Limit

Orley Space Station (OSS), Geostationary Orbit

Evelyn Chambers was dreaming.

She was in an odd room about four metres high and just over five metres deep, and six metres wide. The only level surface was formed by the back wall; ceiling and floor merged into one another, leading her to conclude that she was inside an elliptical tube. In each end of it the architects had set a circular bulkhead at least two metres in diameter. Both bulkheads were sealed, although she didn’t feel closed in, quite the opposite. It promised the certainty of being safely accommodated.

When the rooms had been furnished, the plans must have been temporarily upside down. Like a flying carpet, an expansive bed hovered just above the floor; there was a desk with seats, a computer work station, a huge display. Subdued lighting illuminated the room, a frosted glass door hid shower, wash-basin and toilet. The whole thing resembled a futuristically designed ship’s cabin, except that the comfortable, red-upholstered sofas hung below the ceiling – and the wrong way up.

But the most remarkable thing was that Evelyn Chambers received all these impressions without touching the room or its furniture with a single cell of her body. Just as naked as the choice combination of Spanish, Indian and North American genes had made her, flattered by nothing but fresh air, set to a pleasant 21 degrees Celsius, she floated above the curved, three-metre panoramic front window, and looked at a starry sky of such ineffable clarity and opulence that it could only have been a dream. Shimmering just under 36,000 kilometres below her was the Earth, the work of an Impressionist artist.

It must be a dream.

But Evelyn wasn’t dreaming.

Since her arrival the previous day she couldn’t get enough of her far-away home. There was nothing to obstruct the view, no looming lattice mast, no antenna, no module, not even the space elevator cable running towards the nadir. In a quiet voice she said, ‘Lights out,’ and the lights went out. There was, indeed, a manual remote control for the service systems, but she didn’t want to risk changing her perfect position by waving the thing around. After fifteen hours on board the OSS she had slowly started to get used to weightlessness, even though she was deeply unsettled by the lack of up and down. She was all the more surprised not to have fallen victim to the space sickness people talked about, unlike Olympiada Rogacheva, who lay strapped tightly to her bed, whimpering and wishing she had never been born. Evelyn, on the other hand, felt pure bliss, like the memory of Christmas, pure delight distilled into a drug.

She barely dared breathe.

Staying poised over a single point wasn’t easy, she noted. In a state of weightlessness you involuntarily assumed a kind of foetal position, but Evelyn had stretched her legs and crossed her arms in front of her chest like a diver propelling himself over a reef. Any hasty movement might mean that she would start spinning, or drift away from the glass. Now that all the light had gone out and the room, furniture included, had half vanished, every cell of her brain wanted to savour the illusion that there was no protecting shell surrounding her, that she was in fact floating like Kubrick’s star-child, naked and alone above this wondrously beautiful planet. And suddenly she saw the tiny, shimmering little ball spinning away and realised that her eyes had filled with tears.

Was this how she had imagined the whole thing? Had she been able to imagine anything at all twenty-four hours ago, when the helicopter came down over the platform in the sea and the travellers got out, the night tugging at their coats and a magnificent sunrise failing to attract anyone’s attention?

From a distance the platform looked imposing and mysterious, and even a little scary; now they are actually there it exerts a fascination of a quite different and much deeper kind. First the feeling hits that this isn’t Disneyland and there’s no going back, that they will soon be swapping this world for a different, alien one. Evelyn isn’t surprised to see some members of the group repeatedly looking across at the Isla de las Estrellas. Olympiada Rogacheva, for example, Paulette Tautou – even Momoka Omura casts stolen glances at the ragged cliffs, where the lights of the Stellar Island Hotel are beaming with an unexpectedly cosy radiance, as if warning them to leave this nonsense and come home, to freshly squeezed fruit-juices, sun-cream and the cries of gulls.

Why us? she asks herself irritably. Why is it always the women who get queasy at the idea of getting into the lift? Are we really such cowardy-custards? Forced by evolution into the role of worry-warts because nothing must be allowed to endanger the brood, while males – dispensable once robbed of their sperm – can advance calmly into the unknown and die there? At that moment she notices that Chuck Donoghue is sweating an unusual amount, Walo Ögi is displaying distinct signs of nerves, she sees the tense expectation on Heidrun Ögi’s face, Miranda Winter’s childlike enthusiasm, the intelligent interest in Eva Borelius’ eyes, and is reconciled to her circumstances. Together they walk up to the multi-storey cylinder of the terminal, and all of a sudden she realises why she was getting agitated before.

Embarrassing – but even she is utterly terrified.

‘To be perfectly honest,’ says Marc Edwards, who is walking along beside her, ‘I don’t have a very good feeling about this.’

‘You don’t?’ Evelyn smiles. ‘I thought you were an adventurer.’

‘Hmm.’

‘That’s what you said on my show, at least. Diving into shipwrecks, diving into caves—’

‘I suspect this is going to be different from diving.’ Edwards stares pensively at his right index finger, its first joint missing. ‘Completely different.’

‘Incidentally, you never told me how that happened.’

‘I didn’t? A puffer-fish. I annoyed him, on a reef off Yucatán. If you tap them on the nose they get angry, retreat and inflate themselves. I kept tapping him’ – Edwards pesters an imaginary puffer-fish – ‘except there was coral everywhere, he couldn’t get any further back, so the next time I did it he just opened his mouth. My finger disappeared into it for a moment. Yeah. You should never try to pull your finger out of a fish’s mouth, certainly not by force. By the time I pulled it out again, there was just a bone sticking out.’

‘You won’t have to worry about things like that up there.’

‘No.’ Edwards laughs. ‘It’ll probably be the safest holiday of our lives.’

They enter the terminal. It’s perfectly circular, and looks even bigger from inside than it seemed from outside. High-powered spotlights illuminate two structures, one in front of the other, identical in every detail but mirror images of one another. At the centre of each the cable stretches vertically upwards from its mooring in the ground, surrounded by three barrel-shaped mechanisms oscillating in appearance between cannons and searchlights, their muzzles pointing to the sky. A double grille runs around each of the structures to head height. Its mesh is wide enough for a person to slip through, but its presence indicates quite clearly that this would be a bad idea.

‘And you know why?’ Julian calls, in a dazzlingly good mood. ‘Because direct contact with the cable can cost you a body-part in a fraction of a second. You must bear in mind that it’s thinner than a razor-blade, but incredibly hard. If I ran a screwdriver over the outside edge, I could slice it to shreds. Does anyone want to have a go with a finger? Does anyone want to get rid of their partner?’

Evelyn can’t help thinking of what a journalist once said: ‘Julian Orley doesn’t go on stage, the stage follows him around.’ Accurate, but the truth still looks a bit different. You actually trust the guy, you believe every single word he says, because his confidence is enough on its own to dissolve doubts, ifs and buts, nos and maybes, like sulphuric acid.

Motionless, and about twenty metres above the ground, the two lifts dangle like insects from the cables. From close to they look less like space shuttles, not least because they have no wings or tail-planes. Instead, what you notice is the wide undersides, mounted with photovoltaic cells. Compared with two days ago, when they came back from orbit, their appearance has changed slightly, in that the tanks of liquid helium-3 have been swapped for rounded, windowless passenger modules. Walkways lead from a high balustrade to open entrance hatches in the bellies of the cabins.

‘Your technology?’ asks Ögi, walking along beside Locatelli, eyes on the lifts’ solar panels.

Locatelli stretches, becoming half an inch taller. Evelyn can’t help thinking of the late Muammar al-Gaddafi. The similarity is startling, and so is the monarchical posture.

‘What else?’ he says condescendingly. ‘With the traditional junk those boxes wouldn’t get ten metres up.’

‘They wouldn’t?’

‘No. Without Lightyears, nothing here would work at all.’

‘Are you seriously trying to claim the lift wouldn’t work without you?’ smiles Heidrun.

Locatelli peers at her as if she is a rare species of beetle. ‘What do you know about these things?’

‘Nothing. It just looks to me as if you’re standing there with an electric guitar around your neck claiming that an acoustic would produce nothing but crap. Who are you again?’

‘But, mein Schatz’ – Ögi’s bushy moustache twitches with amusement – ‘Warren Locatelli is the Captain America of alternative energies. He’s tripled the yield from solar panels.’

‘Okay,’ murmurs Momoka Omura, who is walking along beside him. ‘Don’t expect too much of her.’

Ögi raises his eyebrows. ‘You may not believe it, my little lotus blossom, but my expectations of Heidrun are exceeded again every day.’

‘In what respect?’ Momoka gives a mocking grimace.

‘You couldn’t even imagine. But nice of you to ask.’

‘Anyway, with traditional energy those things on the cable would creep up at best,’ says Locatelli, as if the bickering isn’t going on around him. ‘It would take us days to get there. I can explain it to you if you’re interested.’

‘I’m not sure, my dear. Look, we’re Swiss, and we do everything very slowly. That’s why we built that particle accelerator all those years ago.’

‘To produce faster Swiss people?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Doesn’t it keep breaking down?’

‘Yes, quite.’

Evelyn stands close behind them, absorbing it all like a bee sucking nectar. She likes this kind of thing. It’s always the way: put a lot of birds of paradise in a cage, and the feathers will fly.

The get-up gives a hint of what’s to come. First everyone is dressed in silver and orange overalls, the colours of Orley Enterprises, then the whole group heads up to the gallery from which the walkways descend to the lifts. Next they make the acquaintance of a powerfully built black man, whom Julian introduces as Peter Black.

‘Easy to remember,’ Black says cheerfully, and shakes everyone’s hand. ‘But just call me Peter.’

‘Peter’s one of our two pilots and expedition leaders,’ Julian explains. ‘He and Nina – ah, here she is!’

A blonde woman with a short haircut and a freckled snub nose climbs out of the lift hatch and joins them. Julian puts an arm around her muscular shoulders. Evelyn screws up her eyes and bets that Nina turns up in Julian’s bedroom from time to time.

‘May I introduce you: Nina Hedegaard from Denmark.’

‘Hey!’ Nina waves to everybody.

‘Same role as Peter: pilot, expedition leader. They will both be by your side over the next two weeks, whenever you’re travelling vast distances. They will show you the most beautiful parts of our satellite, and protect you from weird space creatures such as the Chinese. Apologies, Rebecca – the red Chinese of course!’

With a start, Rebecca Hsu looks up from the display of her phone.

‘I have no network,’ she says pleadingly.

It’s cramped inside the lift cabin. You have to climb. Six rows of five seats are arranged vertically, connected by a ladder. The luggage has been stowed in the other lift. Evelyn Chambers sits in the same row as Miranda Winter, Finn O’Keefe and the Rogachevs. She leans back and stretches her legs. In terms of comfort, the seats are easily a match for first class in any airline.

‘Ooohh, how nice,’ Miranda says, delighted. ‘A Dane.’

‘You like Denmark?’ Rogachev asks with cool politeness, while Olympiada stares straight ahead.

‘Excuse me!’ Miranda opens her eyes wide. ‘I am a Dane.’

‘You must forgive my ignorance, I work in the steel sector.’ Rogachev’s mouth curls into a smile. ‘Are you an actress?’

‘Hmm. Opinions vary on that one.’ Miranda gives a loud, dirty laugh. ‘What am I, Evelyn?’

‘The entertainment factor?’ Evelyn suggests.

‘Well, okay, I’m actually a model. So I’ve done pretty much everything. Of course I wasn’t always a model, I used to be a salesgirl at the cheese counter, then I was responsible for the fries at McDonald’s, but then I was discovered on this kind of casting show? And then Levi’s took me on straight away. I caused car accidents! I mean, six foot tall, young, pretty, and boobs, genuine boobs, you understand, the real thing – Hollywood was bound to give me a call sooner or later.’

O’Keefe, slouching in his seat, raises an eyebrow. Olympiada Rogacheva seems to have worked out that you can’t deny reality just by looking away.

‘So what kinds of parts have you played?’ she asks flatly.

‘Oh, I had my breakthrough with Criminal Passion, an erotic thriller.’ Miranda gives a sugary smile. ‘I even got a prize, but let’s not go into that.’

‘Why? That’s very— that’s great.’

‘Not really – they gave me the Golden Raspberry for the worst performance.’ Miranda laughs and throws her hands in the air. ‘But hey! Then came comedies, but I didn’t have much luck with that. No hits, so I just started drinking. Bad stuff! For a while I looked like a Danish pastry with raisins for eyes, until one night there I am careening along Mulholland Drive and I go over this homeless guy, my God, poor man!’

‘Terrible.’

‘Yeah, but actually not because, between ourselves, he survived and made a lot of money out of it. Not that I’m trying to whitewash anything! But I swear, that’s what happened, and I had my whole stay in jail filmed from the very first second to the last, they were even able to get into the shower. Prison on prime time! And I was back on top again.’ She sighs. ‘Then I met Louis Burger. Do you know him?’

‘No, I—’

‘Oh, right. You’re from the steel sector, or your husband is, where you don’t know people like that. Although Louis Burger, industrialist, investment magnate—’

‘Really not—’

‘No, I’m sure I do,’ Rogachev says thoughtfully. ‘Wasn’t there a swimming accident?’

‘That’s right. Our happiness lasted only two years.’ Miranda stares straight ahead. Suddenly she sniffs and rubs something from the corner of her eye. ‘It happened off the coast of Miami. Heart attack, when swimming, and now can you imagine what his children have done, the revolting brats? Not ours, we didn’t have any, the ones from Louis’s previous marriage. They only go and sue me! Me, his wife? They’re saying I contributed to his death, can you believe it?’

‘And did you?’ O’Keefe asks innocently.

‘Idiot!’ For a moment Miranda looks deeply hurt. ‘Everybody knows I was acquitted. What can I do about it if he leaves me thirteen billion? I could never harm anyone, I couldn’t hurt a fly! You know what?’ She looks Olympiada deep in the eyes. ‘As a matter of fact I can’t do anything at all. But I do it really well! Hahaha! And you?’

‘Me?’ Olympiada looks as if she’s been ambushed.

‘Yes. What do you do?’

‘I—’ She looks pleadingly at Oleg. ‘We’re—’

‘My wife is a member of the Russian Parliament,’ says Rogachev without looking at her. ‘She’s the daughter of Maxim Ginsburg.’

‘Hey! Oh, my God! Wooaahh! Ginsburg, wooooww!’ Miranda claps her hands, winks conspiratorially at Olympiada, thinks for a moment and asks greedily: ‘And who’s that?’

‘The Russian president,’ Rogachev explains. ‘Until last year at least. The new one’s called Mikhail Manin.’

‘Oh, yeah. Hasn’t he done it before?’

‘He hasn’t, in fact.’ Rogachev smiles. ‘Maybe you mean Putin.’

‘No, no, it’s longer ago, something with an “a” and “in” at the end.’ Miranda trawls through the nursery of her education. ‘Nope, it’s not coming.’

‘Maybe you mean Stalin?’ O’Keefe asks slyly.

The PA system puts an end to all their speculation. A soft, dark woman’s voice issues safety instructions. Almost everything she says sounds to Evelyn like a perfectly normal aeroplane safety routine. They fasten their belts, like horse harnesses. In front of each row of seats, monitors light up and transmit vivid camera pictures of the outside world, giving the illusion that you’re looking through windowpanes. They see the inside of the cylinder, increasingly illuminated by the rising sun. The hatch closes, life-support systems spring to life with a hum, then the seats tip backwards so that they’re all lying as if they’re at the dentist’s.

‘Tell me, Miranda,’ whispers O’Keefe, turning his head towards Miranda. ‘Do you still have names for them?’

‘Who?’ she asks back, just as quietly. ‘Oh, right. Of course.’ Her hands become display units. ‘This one’s Huey. That other one’s Dewey.’

‘What about Louie?’

She looks at him from under lowered eyelids.

‘For Louie we’ll have to get to know each other better.’

At that moment a jolt runs through the cabin, a tremor and a vibration. O’Keefe slips lower in his seat. Evelyn holds her breath. Rogachev’s face is blank. Olympiada has her eyes shut. Somewhere someone laughs nervously.

What happens next is nothing, but nothing, like the launch of a plane.

The lift accelerates so quickly that Evelyn feels momentarily as if she has merged with her seat. She is pressed into the plump upholstery until arms and armrests seem to have become one. The vehicle shoots vertically out of the cylinder. Below them, from the perspective of a second camera, the Isla de las Estrellas shrinks to a long, dark scrap with a turquoise dot inside it, the pool. Was it really only yesterday that she was lying down there, critically eyeing her belly, bewailing the extra four kilos that had recently driven her from bikini to one-piece, while everyone around her was constantly insisting that her weight increase suited her and stressed her femininity? Forget the four kilos, she thinks. Now she could swear she weighs tonnes. She feels so heavy that she’s afraid she might at any moment crash through the floor of the lift and plop down in the sea, causing a medium-sized tsunami.

The ocean becomes an even, finely rippling surface, early sunlight pours in gleaming lakes across the Pacific. The lift climbs the cable at incredible speed. They hurtle through high-altitude fields of vapour, and the sky becomes bluer, dark blue, deep blue. A display on the monitor informs her that they are travelling at three times, no, four times, eight times the speed of sound! The earth curves. Clouds scatter to the west, like fat snowflakes on water. The cabin accelerates further to twelve thousand kilometres an hour. Then, very slowly, the murderous pressure eases. The seat begins to heave Evelyn back up again, and she completes the transformation back from dinosaur to human being, a human being who cares about an extra four kilos.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board OSS Spacelift One. We have now reached our cruising speed and passed through the Earth’s lower orbit, the one in which International Space Station ISS circles. In 2023 operation of the ISS was officially halted, and since then it has served as a museum featuring exhibits from the early days of space travel. Our journey time will be about three hours, the space debris forecast is ideal, so everything suggests that we will arrive at OSS, Orley Space Station, in good time. At present we are starting to pass through a Van Allen radiation belt, a shell of highly charged particles around the Earth, caused by solar eruptions and cosmic radiation. On the Earth’s surface we are protected from these particles; above an altitude of one thousand kilometres, however, they are no longer deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, and flow directly into the atmosphere. Around here, or more precisely at an altitude of seven hundred kilometres, the inner belt begins. It essentially consists of high-energy protons, and reaches its highest densities at an altitude of between three thousand and six thousand kilometres. The outer belt extends from altitudes of fifteen to twenty-five thousand kilometres, and is dominated by electrons.’

Evelyn is startled to note that the pressure has completely disappeared. No, more than that! For a brief moment she thinks she’s falling, until she realises where she has had this strange feeling of being released from her own body before. She experienced it briefly during the zero-gravity flights. She is weightless. In the main monitor she sees the starry sky, diamond dust on black satin. The voice from the speaker assumes a conspiratorial tone.

‘As many of you may have heard, critics of manned space travel see the Van Allen belts as an impassable obstacle on the way to space because of the high concentration of radiation. Conspiracy theorists even see them as proof that man was never on the Moon. Supposedly it would only be possible to pass through them behind steel walls two metres thick. Be assured, none of this is true. The fact is that the intensity of the radiation fluctuates greatly according to variations in solar activity. But even under extreme conditions, the dosage, as long as you are surrounded by aluminium three millimetres thick, is half of what is considered safe under general radiation protection regulations for professional life. Generally it’s less than one per cent of that! In order to protect your health to the optimum degree, the passenger cabins of this lift are armoured accordingly, which is, incidentally, the chief reason for the lack of windows. As long as you don’t feel an urge to get out, we can guarantee your complete safety as you pass through the Van Allen belt. Now enjoy your trip. In the armrests of your seats you will find headphones and monitors. You have access to eight hundred television channels, video films, books, games—’

The whole caboodle, then. After a while Nina Hedegaard and Peter Black come floating over, handing out drinks in little plastic bottles that you have to suck on to get anything out of them, finger food and refreshment towels.

‘Nothing that could spill or crumble,’ Hedegaard says, with a Scandinavian sibi-lance on the S. Miranda Winter says something to her in Danish, Hedegaard replies, they both grin. Evelyn leans back and grins too, even though she didn’t understand a word. She just feels like grinning. She is flying into space, to Julian’s far-away city…

…in which she felt now as if she were alone with the Earth. It lay so far below her, so small, that it looked as if she would just have to reach out and the planet would slip softly into the palm of her hand. Gradually the darkness faded towards the west and the Pacific began to glow. China still slept, while staff in North America were already hurrying to their lunch-breaks, talking on their phones, and Europe was spinning towards the end of the working day. She was astonished to realise that three more earths would have fitted in the space between her and the blue and white sphere, although it would have been a bit of a tight squeeze. Almost 36,000 kilometres above her home, the OSS drifted in space. That in itself stretched her imagination to its limits, and yet to reach the Moon they would have to travel ten times as far.

After a while she pushed herself away from the window and floated over to one of the upside-down sofas. She clambered rather inelegantly into it. Strictly speaking, there was no point in even having furniture in a place like this. Underwater, buoyancy compensated for gravitation to allow you to float, but you were still subject to influences such as water density and current, while in zero gravity no forces at all affected the body. You didn’t weigh anything, you didn’t tend to move in any particular direction, you didn’t need a chair to keep you from falling on your behind, or the comfort of soft cushions, or a bed to stretch out on. Basically you needed only to float in the void with your legs and forearms bent, except that even the tiniest motor impulses, a twitch of a muscle, were enough to set the body drifting, so that you were in constant danger of cracking your head in your sleep. Millions of years of genetic predisposition also required you to lie on something, even if it was vertical or stuck to the ceiling. At the same time concepts such as ‘vertical’ were irrelevant in space, but people were used to systems of reference. Investigations had shown that space travellers found the idea of an earth at their feet more natural than one floating above their heads, which was why psychologists encouraged the so-called gravity-oriented style of construction, to create the illusion of a floor. You just strapped yourself firmly to the bed, in the chair you acted as if you were sitting down, and in the end it felt almost homey.

She stretched, did a somersault and decided to go – float, rather – to breakfast. In the concave wall that seemed to conceal the life-support system, there was a wardrobe from which she chose a pair of dark three-quarter-length trousers and a matching T-shirt and tight-fitting slippers. She paddled over to the bulkhead and said, ‘Evelyn Chambers. Open.’

The computer tested pressure, atmosphere and density, then the module opened to reveal a tube several metres across. Many miles of such tubes stretched all the way across the station, connecting the modules to one another and with the central structure, and creating lines of communication and escape routes. Everything was subject to the redundancy principle. There were always at least two possible ways of leaving a module, each computer system had matching mirror systems, there were several copies of the life-support systems. Months before the trip, Evelyn had tried to imagine the massive construction by studying it using models and documents, before establishing, as she had now, that her fantasy had been blinding her to the reality. In the isolation of the cell in which she was staying, she could hardly imagine the colossus that loomed above it, its size, its complex ramifications. The only thing that was certain was that next to it the good old ISS looked like a toy out of a blister pack.

She was on board the biggest structure in space ever created by human beings.

In homage to the concept of the space elevator, the designers had built the OSS on a vertical. Three massive steel masts, each one 280 metres high, arranged at an equal angle to each other, formed the spine, connected at the base and the head, producing a kind of tunnel through which the cables of the lift passed. Like the storeys of a building, ring-shaped elements called tori stretched around the masts, defining the five levels of the facility. At the bottom level lay the OSS Grand, the space hotel. Torus-1 housed comfortable living rooms, a snack and coffee bar, a room with a holographic fireplace, a library and a rather desperate-looking crèche, which Julian stubbornly planned to extend: ‘Because children will come, they will love it!’ In fact, since its opening two years previously, although the OSS Grand had been well booked, there had so far been no families. Very few people were willing to entrust their offspring to the weightless state, a fact that Julian defiantly dismissed by saying, ‘Nothing but prejudice! People are so silly. It’s no more dangerous up here than it is in the stupid Bahamas, quite the contrary. There’s nothing up here to bite you, you can’t drown, you don’t get jaundice, the natives are friendly, so what is there to worry about? Space is paradise for children!’

Perhaps it was just that people had always had a twisted relationship with paradise.

Like a predatory shark, Evelyn snaked her way along the pipe. You could move incredibly quickly in zero gravity if you put your mind to it. On her way she passed numbered side-tunnels, with suites similar to her own behind them. Every unit consisted of five modules, each divided into two living units and arranged in such a way that all the guests enjoyed an unimpeded view of the Earth. The connection to the torus branched off to the right, but Evelyn fancied breakfast, and continued along the course of the tunnel. It opened out into the Kirk, one of the two most spectacular modules of the OSS. Disc-shaped, these protruded far above the accommodation areas, so that Earth could be seen through the glass floor. The Kirk served as a restaurant; its counterpart to the north, appropriately christened the Picard, alternated between lounge, nightclub and multimedia centre.

‘Making this glass floor stretched us to the limits,’ Julian never tired of stressing. ‘What a struggle! I can still hear the builders’ complaints in my ears. So? said I. Since when have we cared about limits? Astronauts have always yearned for windows, lovely great big panoramic windows, except that the walls weren’t strong enough on the flying sardine-tins of the past. The problem was solved with the lift. We need mass? Send it up there. We want windows? Let’s put some in.’ And then, as he always did, he lowered his voice and whispered almost reverently. ‘Building them like that was Lynn’s idea. Great girl. She’s pure rock ’n’ roll! I tell you.’

The communication hatch leading to the Kirk was open. Evelyn remembered the hazards of her newly won freedom too late, clutched at the frame of the lock to halt her flight, missed it and flew through, flailing her arms, past a not especially startled waiter. Someone grabbed her ankle.

‘Trying to get to the Moon all by yourself?’ she heard a familiar voice say.

Evelyn gave a start. The man drew her down to eye-level.

His eyes—

Of course she knew him. Everyone knew him. She’d had him on her show at least a dozen times, but she still couldn’t get used to those eyes.

‘What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed, bewildered.

‘I’m the evening entertainment.’ He grinned. ‘What about you?’

‘Morale booster for space grouches. Julian and the media, you know…’ She shook her head and laughed. ‘Incredible. Has anyone seen you?’

‘Not yet. Finn’s here, I heard.’

‘Yeah, he was suitably dismayed to bump into me here. He’s become quite trusting now though.’

‘No pose is a pose in itself. Finn enjoys playing the part of the outsider. The less you ask him, the more answers you’ll get. You up for breakfast?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Great, me too. And then?’

‘To the multimedia centre. Lynn’s giving us an introduction to the station. They’ve divided us up. Some people are having the scientific aspect explained to them, the others are going out to play.’

‘And you aren’t?’

‘No, I am, but later. They can only take six people out at any one time. You fancy coming?’

‘I’d love to, but I’ve got no time. We’re shooting a video in Torus-4.’

‘Oh, really, you’re doing something new? Seriously?’

‘Not another word.’ He smiled, putting a finger to his lips. His eyes whisked her off to another galaxy. ‘Remember, someone has to take care of the old folks.’

Lynn smiled, answered questions, smiled again.

She was proud of the multimedia space, just as she was intensely proud of the whole OSS Grand, of the Stellar Island Hotel and the far-away Gaia. At the same time they all filled her with terrible anxiety, as if she had built Venice on matchstick foundations. Everything she did was affected by that awareness. She tortured herself with apocalyptic scenarios, and catharsis was possible only if her worst fears proved to be well founded. She was trapped in a terrible internal struggle, in which she tirelessly pursued another version of herself. The more arguments she produced to quell her anxieties, the bigger they became, as if she were approaching a Black Hole.

I’m going to lose my mind, she thought. Just like Mom. I’m definitely going insane.

Smile. Smile.

‘Lots of people see OSS as a mushroom,’ she said. ‘Or a parasol, or a tree with a flat crown. A bar table. Other people see a medusa.’

‘What’s a medusa again, darling?’ asked Aileen, as if talking about some kind of fashionable gewgaw that teenagers might be interested in.

‘It’s a sort of jellyfish thing,’ Ed Haskin replied. ‘You’ve got this gooey umbrella thing at the top, with tentacles and other sorts of gooey stuff dangling from the bottom.’

Lynn bit her lips. Haskin, previously a director of the spaceport and for a few months now responsible for the whole technical sector, was a nice man, very competent, and sadly equipped with the sensitivity of a Neanderthal.

‘They’re also very beautiful creatures,’ she added.

They were both orbiting a four-metre-tall holographic model of OSS, projected into the centre of Picard. Drifting in their wake through the virtual space came Walo Ögi, Aileen and Chuck Donoghue, Evelyn Chambers, Tim and some recently arrived French scientists. The Picard had a different design from the Kirk, which was closer to classical restaurant style. Here floating islands of conviviality were arranged on different levels, bathed in muted light and overlooked by a long bar that cried out to be populated by Barbarellas with heavy eyeliner. At the touch of a button, everything could be reconfigured, so that tables and seats grouped themselves into an atrium.

‘Jellyfish, table or parasol, such associations are due to the vertical construction and symmetry of the station,’ said Haskin. ‘We mustn’t forget that space stations aren’t buildings with fixed foundations. In fact they don’t actually need foundations at all, but they are exposed to the constant redistribution of mass and all kinds of possible impact, from joggers on treadmills to moon shuttles attaching themselves to the outer ring. All of these things set the structure vibrating independently, and a symmetrical construction is ideally suited to the redistribution of vibration energies. The vertical alignment contributes to the stabilisation, and matches the principle of the space elevator. As you can see, the smallest moment of inertia is directed towards the Earth.’

Right at the bottom the torus with the hotel in it could be seen, with its outrigger suites, and Kirk and Picard protruding above them. Along the lattice masts, modules containing fitness centres, staff accommodation, storerooms and offices were stacked all the way up to Torus-2, at the centre of which the space elevator came to a halt. Retractable gangways linked the bagel-shaped module with the cabins.

‘This is where we arrived yesterday,’ Lynn explained. ‘Torus-2 serves as the reception area for the OSS Grand, and also as a terminal for passengers and freight. As you see, corridors radiate in a spoke arrangement from there to a larger, surrounding ring.’ Her hand passed through a lattice structure that stretched generously around the torus. ‘Our spaceport. Those things that look like aeroplanes are evacuation pods, the little tins are moon shuttles. In one of them, the Charon, we’ll be heading for the satellite tomorrow.’

‘I should have gone on a diet,’ Aileen said excitedly to Chuck. ‘How am I going to fit in one of those? My bum’s the size of Halley’s Comet.’

Lynn laughed.

‘Oh, no, they’re very spacious. Very comfortable. The Charon is over thirty metres long.’

‘And that thing there?’ Ögi had spotted crane-like structures on the top side of the ring and along the mast. He floated over to them, passed through the projection beam for a moment and looked like a huge cosmic monster attacking the OSS.

‘Manipulators,’ said Haskin. ‘Robot arms on tracks. They unload the arriving cargo shuttles, take out the tanks of condensed helium-3, bring them inside the torus and anchor them to the lifts.’

‘What happens exactly when one of those shuttles docks?’

‘There’s a big bang,’ said Haskin.

‘But doesn’t that mean that the station has too much weight on one side? There isn’t always the same number of ships at anchor.’

‘That isn’t a problem. All the docking sites are transferable, we can always right the balance. Well spotted, by the way.’ Haskin looked impressed. ‘Are you an architect?’

‘An investor. But I’ve built various things. Residential modules for cities: you click them into already existing structures or put them on high-rise roofs, and when you move, your little house simply goes with you. The Chinese love it. Flood-resistant estates on the North Sea. You know that Holland’s being flooded; are they all supposed to move to Belgium? The houses are fixed to jetties and float when the water rises.’

‘He’s also building a second Monaco,’ said Evelyn.

‘Why do we need a second Monaco?’ asked Tim.

‘Because the first one’s filled to bursting,’ Ögi explained. ‘The Monégasques are stacking up like the Alps, so Albert and I flicked through our Jules Verne. Have you heard of Propeller Island?’

‘Isn’t that the story of the mad captain in that weird underwater boat?’ Donoghue asked.

‘No, no!’ One of the Frenchmen dismissed the idea. ‘That was the Nautilus! Captain Nemo.’

‘Rubbish! I’ve seen that one. It’s by Walt Disney.’

‘No! Not Walt Disney! Mon Dieu!’

‘Propeller Island is a mobile city state,’ Ögi explained. ‘A floating island. You can’t extend Monaco indefinitely, not even with offshore islands, so we hit on the idea of building a second one that will cruise the South Sea.’

‘A second Monaco?’ Haskin scratched his head. ‘You mean a ship?’

‘Not a ship. An island. With mountains and coasts, a pretty capital city and a wine cellar for old Prince Ernst August. But artificial.’

‘And it works?’

‘You of all people are asking me that?’ Ögi laughed and spread his arms out as if to press the OSS to his heart. ‘Where’s the problem?’

‘There isn’t one,’ Lynn laughed. ‘Or do we look as if we’ve got problems?’

Her eye rested on Tim. Was he actually aware of what was wrong with her? His unease touched and shamed her in equal measure, as he had had every reason to be uneasy since that day, that terrible moment five years before, that was to change their lives, just before six in the evening…

… Lynn is in the middle of the traffic jam, ten lanes of pumping, overheated metal chugging its way along the M25 to Heathrow with the pace of a glacier, under a ruthless, cold February sun gleaming down from a yellowish, cloudy Chernobyl sky, and suddenly it happens. She has to go to Paris for a meeting, she’s always going to some sort of meeting or other, but all of a sudden someone turns off the light in her head, just like that, and everything sinks into a morass of hopelessness. Profound grief sweeps over her, followed by 10,000 volts of pure panic. Later she’s unable to say how she got to the airport, but she isn’t flying, she’s just sitting in the terminal, robbed of all certainties but one, which is that she will not be able to bear her own existence for a second longer, because she doesn’t want to go on living with so much sadness and anxiety. But at that point her memory stops till the morning, when she finds herself fully dressed on the floor of her penthouse flat in Notting Hill, mailbox, email and answering machine spilling over with other people’s excitement. She walks out onto the terrace, into the icy rain that has started falling diagonally, and wonders whether the twelve storeys will be enough. Then she changes her mind and calls Tim, thus sparing the sensibilities of anyone who might have been passing by.

Henceforth, whenever the topic turns to her illness, Julian invokes various baleful viruses and protracted colds as a way of explaining to himself and others what it is that is so terribly afflicting his daughter, his shining light; Tim, on the other hand, is always talking in terms of therapies and psychiatrists. Her condition is a mystery to Julian, and he represses what he perhaps guesses at, just as he has repressed the memory of Crystal’s death. It is ten years since Lynn’s and Tim’s mother died in a state of mental derangement, but Julian develops a remarkable capacity for denial. Not because he is traumatised, but because he is actually incapable of making a connection between the two.

It’s Tim and Amber who come to her rescue. When she feels nothing but naked terror at the loss of all sensation, Tim walks around the block with her, in sunshine and in pouring rain, for hours, he forces her mind back into the present until she is able once again at least to feel the cold and wet, and to become aware of the metallic taste of her fear on her tongue. When she thinks she’ll never be able to sleep again, or keep down a bite of food, when seconds stretch into infinities and everything around her – light, colours, smells, music – emits shock-waves of menace, when every house-roof, every parapet, every bridge invites her to leap, when she fears going mad as Crystal did, running amok, killing people, he makes it clear to her that no demon has taken possession of her, that no monsters are after her, that she wouldn’t hurt anyone, not even herself, and very gradually she starts to believe him.

Things get better, and Tim bugs her. Forces her to take professional help at last, to lie down on the couch. Lynn refuses, plays down the nightmare. Examining the causes? What for? She isn’t even slightly willing to show respect to this miserable phase of her otherwise perfect life. Her nerves have been going haywire, exhaustion, crashing synapses, biochemical mayhem, whatever. Reason to be ashamed, but not to go rummaging for the source of her distress. Why should she? To find what? She is glad and grateful that the company has camouflaged her condition with a series of explanations – flu, very bad flu, bronchitis – now that she’s up and smiling and shaking hands again. The crisis has been survived, the broken doll repaired. Again she sees herself as Julian sees her, a perspective that she temporarily lost. Who cares whether she likes herself? Julian loves her! Seeing herself through his eyes solves all her problems. The stale familiarity of self-debasement, she could live with that.

‘—are the dining and common rooms for the scientific operations,’ she heard herself saying.

She worked her way further up the hologram, from Torus-3 to the sports facilities in Torus-4, to dozens of accommodation and laboratory modules, which Julian had rented out to private and state research establishments from all over the world: NASA, ESA and Roskosmos, his own subsidiaries Orley Space, Orley Travel and Orley Energy. Cheeks aglow, she talked about the vegetable gardens and animal breeding facilities in the domed biospheres above Torus-4, allowed a glimpse into the observatories, workshops, control and meeting rooms of the fifth and final Torus, from which the lift cable led back out and into infinity or what the temporary residents imagined infinity to be. She described the disc-shaped roof, hundreds of metres across, with its wharfs in which moon shuttles and interplanetary spaceships were built, robots dashed busily through the vacuum and solar panels inhaled sunlight, so that the station could feed on the homemade kind during its hours in the Earth’s shadow. Laughing on the brink of the abyss, she presented the OSS, the Orley Space Station, whose builder and owner NASA had so yearned to be. But such a proposition would have required political responsibility, and by their nature politicians were voluble, slippery creatures, and tended to criticise the decisions of their predecessors rather than anything else. Hence, in the end, a private investor had taken the dream of the settlement of space that bit further and, en passant, established the necessary conditions to set off a landslide in the energy sector, which threw up the question of…

‘…whose interests we are actually subsidising if we decide to join forces with Orley Enterprises.’

‘Well, ideally ours,’ said Locatelli. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘I completely agree,’ Rogachev replied. ‘I’d just like to know who else I’m benefiting.’

‘As long as Lightyears remains market leader, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone else who might be getting anything out of it, if I may be so bold out here in geostationary isolation.’

‘Ryba ishchet gde glubzhe, a chelovek gde luchshe.’ Rogachevo smiled thinly. ‘The fish seeks the deepest place, man the best. For my part, I’d prefer a bit more of an overview.’

Locatelli snorted. ‘You’re not going to get that by looking at everything from outside. Perspective comes from position.’

‘Which is?’

‘My company’s, in my case. I know you’re scared of indirectly benefiting Washington and NASA by giving Julian money. But so what? The main thing is that the figures add up at the end of the year.’

‘I’m not sure if you can really see it like that,’ said Marc Edwards, then realised the vacuousness of his observation and turned his attention to the pairs of boots that Nina was handing out.

‘I can see it like that. He can’t.’ Locatelli pointed at the Russian with his thumbs outstretched and laughed broadly. ‘You see, he’s married to politics.’

Finn O’Keefe exchanged a glance with Heidrun Ögi. Rogachev and Locatelli were really getting on his nerves. They were having discussions which, in his opinion, really belonged at the end of the trip. And perhaps he just didn’t know enough about how the sector worked, but in any case, he planned to do nothing over the coming days but enjoy himself as best he could, and obediently shoot the little film clip that he had promised Julian he would do: Perry Rhodan on the real moon, singing the wonders of the real experience. Investor outpourings had no place, he thought, in ‘EVA’s wardrobe’, the dressing area for Extravehicular Activities.

‘And what about you?’ Locatelli stared at him. ‘What’s the view like from Hollywood?’

O’Keefe shrugged. ‘Relaxed.’

‘He wants your money too.’

‘No, he wants my face, so that I can tell moneybags like you that they’ve absolutely got to get to the Moon. You’re right to that extent.’ O’Keefe rubbed his index finger and thumb together. ‘I get hold of money for him. But not mine.’

‘Very clever,’ Locatelli observed to Rogachev. ‘He probably even gets some for himself as well.’

‘Not a cent.’

‘And what do you really think about it? Space tourism, private flights to the Moon?’

O’Keefe looked around. He had expected to see complete spacesuits hanging here, like limp and motionless astronauts, but the section, with its sterile lighting, felt more like a boutique. Folded overalls of all sizes, helmets, gloves and boots lined up side by side, sections of rigid armour.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Ask me again in a fortnight.’

Their little group – Rogachev, Locatelli, Edwards, Mimi, Heidrun Ögi and himself – had herded around Nina Hedegaard, trying not to spin chaotically away. O’Keefe was mastering the art of space ballet better by the hour, and so was Rogachev, who had allowed himself to be dragged along by the excitement of the evening conversation; in addition to football, his love of martial arts was now revealed to the world. The Russian now seemed to possess his body only to subject it to reptilian control. His feelings, in so far as he had any, lay hidden beneath the ice of his pale blue eyes. Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker, both passionate divers, held their position tolerably well, Heidrun strove for control, while Locatelli’s impetuosity had the potential to injure someone.

‘Could I ask you to come closer?’ called Nina.

‘So, between ourselves’ – Mimi Parker lowered her voice – ‘there are rumours going around. No idea if there’s anything to it, but some people are suggesting that Julian’s running out of puff.’

‘Meaning?’

‘He’s as good as broke.’

‘That’s nothing,’ Heidrun whispered. ‘You know who really is running out of puff?’

‘Sure.’ Mimi leaned forward. ‘Out with it.’

‘You lot, you bunch of chatterboxes. And you’ll be running out of puff out there if you don’t stop talking nonsense.’

Rogachev studied her with the amusement of a cat being growled at by mice.

‘There’s something refreshing about you, Mrs Ögi.’

She beamed at him as if he’d just crowned her Miss Moscow. The Russian twitched his eyebrows with amusement and floated closer to Nina. Heidrun followed him clumsily. Her limbs seemed to have grown even longer and more unwieldy in zero gravity. The Dane waited until they had all formed a semicircle around her, then clapped her hands and flashed her perfect teeth to the assembled group.

‘So!’ A hissed Scandinavian S. ‘You’re about to embark on your first space-walk. Everyone excited?’

‘Sure!’ Edwards and Mimi cried simultaneously.

‘With reservations,’ Rogachev smiled. ‘As we are now under your charming care.’

Locatelli flared his nostrils. Excitement was clearly beneath his dignity. Instead he lifted his specially made, vacuum-resistant camera aloft and took a photograph. Nina received the answers and reactions with dimples of delight.

‘You should be a bit excited, because Extravehicular Activities are one of the most demanding aspects of manned space travel. Not only will you be entering a vacuum, you will also be exposed to extreme variations in temperature.’

‘Oh,’ Mimi marvelled. ‘I always thought it was just cold in space.’

‘From the purely physical point of view, there is no prevalent temperature in space. What we describe as temperature is the degree of energy with which the molecules of a body, a fluid or a gas move. Small example: in boiling water they’re charging about all over the place, in ice they’re almost motionless, so we experience one as hot and the other as cold. In empty space, on the other hand—’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Locatelli murmured impatiently.

‘—we find practically no molecules at all. So there’s nothing to measure. Theoretically this brings us to zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or minus two hundred and seventy-three degrees Celsius, absolute zero. However, we record the so-called cosmic background radiation, a kind of afterglow from the time of the Big Bang, when the universe was still unimaginably dense and hot. That comes to just three degrees. Doesn’t exactly warm things up. Nonetheless, you can burn up or freeze out there, depending.’

‘We all know that already,’ Locatelli pressed. ‘I’m more interested in where—’

‘Well I don’t know it.’ Heidrun turned her head towards him. ‘But I’d like to know. As you might imagine, I’m vulnerable to sunburn.’

‘But what she’s telling us is all general knowledge!’

Heidrun stared at him. Her eyes said, fuck you, smart-arse. Nina gave a conciliatory smile.

‘So, in empty space any body, whether it’s a spaceship, a planet or an astronaut, assumes the temperature that matches its environment. That’s based on the factors of solar radiation and reflection into space. That’s why spacesuits are white, to reflect as much light as possible, which means they don’t heat up as much. Even so, temperatures of over a hundred and twenty degrees Celsius have been measured on spacesuits on the side facing the sun, while the temperature on the shaded side was minus a hundred and one degrees Celsius.’

‘Brrr,’ said Mimi.

‘Don’t worry, you won’t notice it. Spacesuits are temperature-controlled. Inside they’re a bearable twenty-two degrees Celsius. Of course only if the suit has been put on right. Negligence can mean death. Later on the Moon you’ll find similar conditions: in the polar regions there are craters which, at minus two hundred and thirty degrees, are amongst the coldest areas in the whole solar system! Light never enters them. On average the daytime temperature on the Moon’s surface is a hundred and thirty degrees Celsius; at night it falls to minus a hundred and sixty degrees – which is, incidentally, a reason why the Apollo landings took place in the Moon morning, when the sun is low and it’s not quite so hot. Still, when Armstrong passed into the shadow of his moon module, the temperature of his suit dropped all of a sudden from sixty-five to minus one hundred degrees Celsius, in one single step! Any further questions?’

‘About the vacuum,’ said Rogachev. ‘I gather our bodies will explode if we’re exposed to an airless space without protection?’

‘It’s not quite as dramatic as that. But you would die whatever happened, so it’s a good idea to keep your helmet on nicely at all times. Most of you are familiar with the old spacesuits in which you looked like a marshmallow. So inflated that the astronauts literally had to go hopping about because their trouser legs didn’t bend. For short missions and occasional space outings that was fine. But in continuously inhabited space cities, on the Moon or on Mars, monster suits like that wouldn’t make any sense at all.’

Nina pointed to the tight-fitting overall that she herself was wearing. It was made of a thick neoprene-like material and was covered with a network of dark lines. Her elbows and knees were protected by hard shells. Even though she looked as if she’d put on three diving suits one over the other, the ensemble seemed somehow sexy on her.

‘That’s why they’ve recently started using suits like these. Bio-suits, developed by a beautiful woman, Professor Dava Newman of MIT. They’re pretty, don’t you think?’ Nina turned slowly on her axis. ‘You’re going to ask me how the required pressure is created. Very simple. Instead of gas, a huge number of fixed metal braces create a mechanical counter-pressure. It’s only where the skin is highly mobile that the material is kept flexible; in all other areas it’s rigid, it’s practically an exoskeleton.’

Nina took a torso-shaped shell from the nearest shelf.

‘All armour and applications fit the basic unit, as this carbon-fibre torso protector reveals. A backpack full of life-support systems is connected to attachment points on the back, and air is pumped into the helmet and guided along pipes to the boots and gloves, the only areas in which there is gas pressure. The traditional, noisy cooling system has been replaced by a temperature-controlling nano-layer. There are additional protectors for the limbs, like the ones you’ll know from mediaeval suits of armour, except much lighter and harder. In space you’re exposed to cosmic radiation, there are micrometeorites flying about, and on the Moon you’ll be exposed to regolith, moon dust. While the movements of your feet in space don’t really matter much, on planetary surfaces they’re crucially important. To do justice to all that, bio-suits are conceived as construction sets. Dozens of elements can be combined at will, quickly and with only a few rapid manoeuvres. You breathe the same oxygen–nitrogen mixture as you do on Earth and here on board, and now you no longer have to wait for ages in the pressure chamber.’

She started pulling on her boots and gloves, attached the backpack with the life-support systems to the back plate of the suit and linked the connectors to one another.

‘Child’s play, Dava Newman would say, but be careful. Don’t try to do it on your own. Don’t make me have to come and pick you up, all dried up and twisted. Okay? Fine! Bio-suits are low-maintenance, and one more thing while we’re on the subject: if anyone feels a certain physical need – just let it flow. Your valuable pee is trapped in a thick layer of polyacrylate, so don’t worry that it’s going to splash down your legs. These’ – and Nina pointed to two consoles under the wrist – ‘are controls for a total of sixteen thrust nozzles in the shoulder and hip areas. Astronauts no longer dangle like newborn babies from umbilical cords; they navigate by recoil. The blasts are short, and they can be manually released or left up to computer calculation. That option’s a new one. When the electronics decide that you’ve lost control, you’re automatically stabilised. Your computers are connected to mine, and remote-controlled as well, so strictly speaking you can’t get lost. Here’ – her hand slipped over another console along her forearm – ‘you’ll find thirty little buttons, each one with the option of speaking and receiving. With these you’ll decide who you want to communicate with. “Talk to all” means you’re talking to everybody, “Listen to all” means you’re receiving everybody. To get your declarations of love out of the way, choose the individual connection and switch the rest off.’ Nina grinned. ‘Anyone worried about me seeing you in your underwear? Nobody? Then off with your clothes! Let’s get ready to go out there.’

‘What about the chickens?’ asked Mukesh Nair.

‘A crackpot idea,’ Julian objected. ‘There are four left. Two are even still laying eggs, little spherical things with the nutritional value of golf balls. The pelvic muscles of the others have regressed so far that they can’t push anything out.’

‘So much for births in space,’ said Eva Borelius. ‘Push, push! But what with?’

‘And what about the chicken poo?’ Karla Kramp seemed weirdly fascinated by the subject.

‘Oh, they crap more than we’d like them to,’ said Julian. ‘We tried to siphon it off, but you have to be careful that you don’t suck the feathers off the poor creatures’ butts. The whole thing’s pretty tricky. Quite honestly, I don’t know how to raise chickens in zero gravity. They don’t like it. They’re always bumping into each other, you have to put them on leashes, they look baffled. Unlike fish, by the way! They don’t seem to care, they live in a kind of floating state anyway. We could look into fish-breeding next, if you like.’

‘We haven’t tried everything yet,’ announced Kay Woodthorpe, a squat woman with the face of a Chihuahua, who worked for the bioregenerative systems research group. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll try artificial gravity.’

‘How would you do that?’ asked Carl Hanna. ‘By making the OSS rotate?’

‘No,’ Julian shook his head. ‘Just the breeding module, uncoupled and stored a few kilometres away. A structure like OSS isn’t suited to spinning. You’d need a wheel for that.’

‘Like in science fiction movies?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But you’ve got one here,’ said Tautou. ‘Not a wheel, perhaps, but axial symmetric elements—’

‘You’re talking about a Bernal sphere, my friend. That’s something else. A wheel whose rotational element corresponds to the speed of the Earth’s rotation.’ Julian frowned. ‘Imagine a car tyre or a cylindrical body. When it turns, centrifugal forces arise at the internal wall, opposite the axis. Then something like gravity comes into being. You can walk along a self-enclosed surface, excellent jogging route, by the way, while the gravity decreases towards the axis. Feasible in principle. The problem is the requisite size and stability of such a structure. A wheel with a diameter of – let’s say – a hundred metres would have to complete a rotation every fourteen seconds, and the gravity at your feet would probably be stronger than the gravity at your head, because your body accelerates to different degrees. And besides, if you set something like that in motion— You know that from driving: when one of your tyres isn’t properly balanced, it lurches like mad; and now imagine a rotating station starting to careen. You’ve got people walking about, how are you going to ensure that they’re evenly distributed at all times? You couldn’t begin to calculate the vibrations produced, everyone would be nauseous, the thing might explode—’

‘But you’ve left the era of lightweight construction behind,’ said Hanna. ‘With the lift you can put unlimited mass in orbit. Just build a bigger, more stable one.’

‘Would such a thing be possible?’ Tautou said in amazement. ‘Like the one in 2001?’

‘Sure.’ Julian nodded. ‘I knew Kubrick. The old guy had thought very carefully about that, or let’s say he’d had other people think about it for him. I’ve always dreamed of copying his space station. That massive wheel turning to the sounds of waltz-music, which you can walk around. But it would have to be huge. Four kilometres in diameter. High orbit, highly armoured. So you could fit a whole city inside, with residential areas, parks, maybe a river—’

‘I think this is quite fascinating enough,’ Sushma Nair said to her husband and, glowing with enthusiasm, touched his arm. ‘Look at that, Mukesh. Spinach. Courgettes!’

They were floating along a glass wall several metres high. Behind it all kinds of greenery curled and sprouted, fruits dangled from trees.

‘Pioneering work, Julian,’ Mukesh agreed. ‘You’ve managed to impress a simple peasant.’

‘Just as you have impressed the world.’ Julian smiled.

False modesty, Nair, thought Hanna.

While a brave little group explored the vacuum outside, he, Eva Borelius, Karla Kramp, Bernard Tautou and the Nairs were, under the expert guidance of Julian and Kay Woodthorpe, viewing the two biospheres, the huge, spherical modules in which the bioregenerative life-support system department was experimenting with agriculture and animal-rearing. Over six floors, Biosphere A brought together courgettes and cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, paprika and broccoli, a real Little Italy of vegetables, as well as kiwi-fruit and strawberries, the whole thing populated by a fauna of bustling robots, constantly planting, fertilising, hoeing, cutting and harvesting. Hanna wouldn’t have been surprised to see carbon-fibre-reinforced rabbits with radio-telescope ears gnawing at the lettuce and suddenly floating away at their approach. He threw back his head. One level up, apple-trees stretched knotty branches resplendent with cudgel-hard fruits.

At first, Woodthorpe told them, there had been massive problems. The predecessors of the greenhouses, called salad-machines, had been little more than standard racks in which tomatoes and lettuce flourished in competition. As plants took their bearings from gravity like almost all living creatures, and thus knew where to stretch and in which direction to send their roots, the loss of up and down had led to the formation of terrible thickets – unfortunately at the expense of the fruits, which led a wretched guerrilla lifestyle in the middle of the kraken-like root-monster. Thrown into confusion, even spinach had produced only woody stalks in a desperate bid to cling onto something, until it occurred to someone to subject the fields to artificial tremors, brief shakes as a result of which their fruit and vegetable plants finally sought support down below, where the vibrations came from.

‘Since then we’ve had the rank growth under control, and you can see the quality,’ Woodthorpe explained. ‘Certainly, it is and will always be greenhouse produce. The strawberries taste a bit watery, you wouldn’t necessarily win any prizes with the red peppers—’

‘But the courgettes are great,’ said Julian.

‘Yeah, and so’s the broccoli and amazingly the tomatoes too. We don’t really know yet why one works better than the other. At any rate the greenhouses give us cause to hope that we may in future be able to close life-support systems that are presently open. On the Moon we’ve nearly got there.’

‘What do you mean “close”?’ asked Karla.

‘Just like on Earth. Nothing gets lost there. The Earth is a self-enclosed system, everything is constantly being processed. Just look on the space station as a small copy of our planet with proportionately limited resources of water, air and fuel, except that in the past we couldn’t rework all those resources. We were constantly forced to maintain supplies. Carbon dioxide, for example, got completely out of hand. Today we can split it in reactors, use the liberated oxygen again to breathe, or combine it with hydrogen to form water, and the remaining carbon can be synthesised with methane to form fuel. Just a bit of sludge gets lost in the process, and it’s hardly worth mentioning. The problem is more one of bringing the size and consumption of the reactors into a convincing relationship with their effectiveness. So we try to do that with natural regeneration processes. Plants can also serve that purpose. Our own little rainforest, if you like. On the Moon we have bigger greenhouses, and we’re on the brink of completely closing all the cycles.’

‘No market for a water-supplier, then,’ laughed Tautou.

‘No, the OSS is on the way to complete self-reliance.’

‘Hmm, self-reliance.’ Karla thought for a moment. ‘So you could soon be declaring independence, could you? Or the whole Moon. By the way, who does the Moon actually belong to?’

‘Nobody,’ said Julian. ‘According to the lunar treaty.’

‘Interesting.’ Karla’s Modigliani eyebrows raised, arches of amazement, her face an oval full of ovals. ‘Given that it doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s not short of people.’

‘That’s right. The treaty urgently needs to be rewritten.’

‘Perhaps to say that the Moon belongs to everybody?’

‘Correct.’

‘So the people who got there first. Or who are already up there. America and China.’

‘By no means. Anyone else can follow them.’

‘Can anyone follow them?’ she asked slyly.

‘That, my dear Karla,’ smiled Julian, ‘is exactly the point.’

Finn O’Keefe tried to find solace in physics.

The dressing process had gone on for ages, until at last the group hung, packed and helmeted, in the hermetic seclusion of the airlock, a clinically illuminated, empty room with rounded edges. Hand-grips ran along the walls; a display provided information about pressure, temperature and atmospheric composition. Nina explained that this chamber was considerably larger than the other hatches distributed around the OSS. Once Peter Black had joined them, the group now comprised eight people. A hiss, growing quieter and finally fading away, indicated that the air was being sucked out, then the outer bulkheads glided silently open.

O’Keefe gulped.

In thrall to early human fears of plunging into the abyss, and with butterflies in his stomach, he stared outside. Part of the roof extended before his eyes. He didn’t know what he had expected: an outlet, a balcony, a gangway, regardless of the fact that none of it made any sense up here. The circular level had no floor – it was an open structure with a diameter of four hundred metres, surrounded by a steel ring, massive enough that railway lines could have passed through it, and fitted with payloads and manipulators. A radial arrangement of supporting constructions led from the torus to the other areas. Beyond that solar park, glittering in the sunlight, radiators circulated and spherical tanks hung from crane-like cantilevers. Batteries of floodlights illuminated huge hangars, the birthplaces of future spaceships. Tiny astronauts floated below the belly of a steel giant, overseeing the installation of rows of seats by robot arms. Bizarre machine-creatures, half man, half insect, crisscrossed the area, carried parts in locust arms, crawled with segmented grasping claws around the scaffolding and girders, carried out soldering work and riveted prefabricated components. Their android faces seemed to have been inspired by the character Boba Fett, the always helmeted contract killer from Star Wars, leading inevitably to the conclusion that Julian Orley had been involved in their development – Orley with his enthusiasm for science-fiction films, who always managed to transform quotations into innovations.

Beyond the hatch a chasm yawned.

The vertical structure of the OSS stretched almost three hundred metres below O’Keefe, and below it lay the Earth, an unimaginable distance away. He hesitated, felt his heart thundering. Although he knew about the irrelevance of his weight, it seemed sheer madness to pass beyond the edge, like leaping from a skyscraper.

Physics, he thought. Trust in the law of God.

But he didn’t believe in God anyway.

Beside him, Nina Hedegaard and Peter Black sailed sedately outside, turned around and presented the mirrored fronts of their helmets. ‘The first time is always a breakthrough,’ he heard the Danish woman say. ‘But you can’t fall. Just try to adjust your way of thinking.’

Got me, thought O’Keefe.

A moment later he was given a push, slipped out over the edge towards the two guides and right past them. Startled, he gasped for air and braced himself as he flew, but there was nothing there to stop him. Dispatched on a journey of no return, he drifted away. The idea of being lost in space, of being slung out into the void, flashed through his mind and he started flailing wildly, which only made him look all the more ridiculous.

‘Look,’ Laura Lurkin said. ‘It’s the ladies’ programme.’

Amber thought she could physically feel the corrosive effect of the mockery. She knew from Lynn that the fitness trainer, a menacingly sculpted block of humanity with a wrestler’s crotch, a troll’s arms and a soothing voice, didn’t particularly care for space tourists. Her attitude was based on her conviction that private individuals had no business being anywhere higher up than the current passenger flight-paths. Lurkin was a former Navy Seal, hardened in the fire of geopolitical conflicts. When Olympiada, Miranda, Rebecca, Momoka and Amber turned up at the spa area like a delegation of fun-hungry First Ladies, Lurkin’s initial reaction had been, quite reasonably, to make fun of them, albeit in a moderately affable tone. After all, it was her job to keep orbital travellers fit, not to depress them.

‘You’ve got to go, Amber! Please! We’ve got the EVA, the guided tour through the scientific area, the multimedia performance: I’d have been happy if we could have distributed the silly women across the three groups, but they wanted their beauty programme. I’m glad we don’t have to deal with Paulette, but—’

‘I’d actually rather come to your presentation, Lynn.’

‘I know. I’m sorry, believe me! But someone has to give those four the feeling that we’re making them just as welcome as all the others, who want more from an orbital trip than a bit of sweating and peeling and having their spots squeezed. I’d do the job myself, but I can’t!’

‘Oh, Lynn. Does it have to be like that? Tim and I—’

‘They accept you as a representative, as a hostess.’

‘But I’m not the hostess.’

‘No, but you are in their eyes. You’re an Orley. Please, Amber!’

That pleading tone!

‘Okay, fine, whatever. But put me on the second space-walk this afternoon!’

‘Oh, Amber, let me kiss you! You can walk all the way to Jupiter, I’ll make the sandwiches myself! Thank you!’

So here it was, the ladies’ programme.

The fitness centre occupied two modules, elliptically flattened like the accommodation tubes. In the upper part there was a real sauna, without wooden benches, admittedly, but with straps for the hands and feet and generously sized windows, as well as a steam sauna, whose rounded walls copied the stars in the form of hundreds of tiny electric bulbs. In the crystal cave you could drift through droplets of ice-cold water that was sprayed into the room and then sucked back out again, in the quiet zone you could listen to celestial music, read or snooze. A floor further down, various fitness devices, massage rooms and strong hands waited for the stressed-out part-time astronauts.

‘—indispensable in space!’ Lurkin was saying. ‘Zero gravity is all well and good, but it contains a lot of dangers that shouldn’t be underestimated, if you’re exposed to it over a long period. You’ll already have noticed certain changes in yourself. Warming in the head and chest, for example. Immediately after the start of zero gravity, more than half a litre of blood rises from the lower regions of the body to the thorax and head. You’ll get apple cheeks and what astronauts call a ‘puffy face’. It’s a nice effect, by the way, because it compensates for wrinkles and makes you look younger. But not in the long term, unfortunately. Once you get back to Earth, gravity will tug at your tissues just as it always has done, so enjoy the moment.’

‘My legs are freezing,’ Rebecca Hsu said suspiciously, inflated in her dressing-gown until she looked like a globe made of terry towelling. ‘Is that normal?’

‘Quite normal. In accordance with the redistribution of your bodily fluids your legs will feel rather cold. You’ll get used to that, as you will to your outbreaks of sweating and temporary disorientation. I heard that one of you suffered quite badly from that?’

‘Madame Tautou,’ Miranda Winter said. ‘Wow! The poor woman keeps—’ She lowered her voice. ‘Well, it’s coming out everywhere, in fact.’

‘Space sickness.’ Lurkin nodded. ‘No reason to be ashamed, even experienced astronauts suffer from it. Who else has any other symptoms?’

Olympiada Rogacheva hesitantly raised her hand. After a few seconds Momoka Omura pointed an index finger, before immediately retracting it again.

‘Nothing important,’ she said.

‘Well, with me it’s like this,’ Rebecca said. ‘My sense of balance is a bit confused. Even though I’m actually used to sailing.’

‘I’m just happy if I can keep everything down,’ Rogacheva sighed.

Lurkin smiled. Of course she had been informed that the oligarch’s wife had a breakdown-related alcohol problem. Strictly speaking, Olympiada Rogacheva shouldn’t even have been here, but during the two-week training programme she had drunk nothing but tea, confounding all the sceptics. She could clearly manage without vodka and champagne, after all.

‘Never mind, ladies. By the day after tomorrow you’ll be immune to space sickness. But what affects everybody are physiological long-term changes. In zero gravity your muscle mass declines. Your calves will shrink to chicken legs, your heart and circulation will be overtaxed. That’s why daily sport is the chief duty of every astronaut, meaning exercise machine, gymnastics, weight-lifting, all nicely strapped in, of course. On long-term missions a considerable decline in bone substance has also been observed, particularly in the spine and leg areas. The body loses up to ten per cent of its calcium over six months in space, immune disorders appear, wounds heal more slowly, all concomitant effects that Perry Rhodan shamefully fails to mention. You’ll only be spending a few days in zero gravity, but I urge you to get some exercise. So what shall we start with? Rowing, cycling, jogging?’

Momoka stared at Lurkin as if she had lost her mind.

‘No way. I want to go to the steam-room!’

‘And you’ll get to the steam-room,’ said Lurkin, as if talking to a child. ‘But first we’ll do a spot of fitness training, okay? That’s how it is on board space stations. The instructor’s word is final.’

‘Okay.’ Amber stretched. ‘I’m going on the exercise machine.’

‘And I’m going on the bike,’ Miranda cried with delight.

‘An exercise machine is a bike.’ Momoka pulled a face as if being subjected to a serious injustice. ‘Can we at least swim here?’

‘Of course.’ Lurkin spread her muscle-bound arms. ‘If you can find a way of keeping water in the pool in zero gravity, we can talk about it.’

‘And what about that?’ Rebecca looked at a device on the ceiling just above her head. ‘It looks like a step machine.’

‘Bingo! It trains up your bottom and your thighs.’

‘Exactly right.’ The Taiwanese woman peeled herself out of her dressing-gown. ‘You should never miss an opportunity to fight against physical decay. It’s dramatic enough! I feel as if it’s only my tight underwear that’s keeping me from exploding!’

Amber, who knew Rebecca from the media, raised an eyebrow. Without a doubt, the queen of luxury had put on a fair bit of weight over the past few years, but her skin looked as smooth and tight as a balloon. What was it that Lurkin had said about ‘puffy faces’? Why should the effect be restricted to the face alone? It was obvious that upper arms shouldn’t wobble in zero gravity, that breasts were lifted because they weren’t being drawn towards the Earth’s core, that everything was deliciously rounded and firm. The whole of Rebecca Hsu looked somehow puffy.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You look great.’

‘For your age,’ Momoka added smugly.

With Lurkin’s help, Rebecca wedged herself onto the step machine, allowed herself to be belted in and smiled down at Amber.

‘Thanks, but when the paparazzi need helicopters to get all of you into shot, it’s time to face the facts. I’m starting to turn to jelly. I distribute anti-cellulite miracle cures by some of the most famous cosmetic brands in the world, but slap me on the bum and you have to wait for a quarter of an hour until the waves have subsided.’

And she started jogging like a peasant treading grapes, while Miranda Winter doubled up with laughter and Amber joined in. Momoka’s gestures passed through various stages of human development, then she laughed as well. Something was dissolved, a deep-seated, unconfessed anxiety, and they all rolled around cackling and panting.

Lurkin waited with an indulgent expression on her face and her arms folded.

‘Glad we all agree,’ she said.

‘Out you go!’

Heidrun’s words were followed by a boisterous chortle.

It was the last thing O’Keefe heard before he drifted out of the airlock. Heidrun, that bitch! Frank Poole, the unlucky astronaut from 2001, had fallen victim to a paranoid computer, now he to a homicidal Swiss woman. His fingers grasped the thruster controls. The first stimulus stopped his flight; the second, intended to turn him back towards the airlock, instead sent him into a spin.

‘Very good,’ he heard Nina say, as if she were sitting in the corner of his helmet with fairy-wings. ‘Wonderful reaction speeds for a beginner.’

‘Don’t start,’ he snarled.

‘No, I’m serious. Can you stop the spinning too?’

‘Why should he?’ laughed Heidrun. ‘It looks good. Hey, Finn, you should catch yourself a moon to orbit around you.’

He rotated clockwise. Into the spin.

And it worked. Suddenly he was hanging there motionless, watching the others spin out of the airlock like space debris. The new, close-fitting generation of space-suits had the advantage of not making everyone who wore them look exactly the same. They let you have an idea of who was in front of you, even if their face was barely recognisable through the mirrored visor. Heidrun, clad like a Star Warrior, was given away by her anorexic, elf-like figure. He longed to give her a good kick.

‘I’ll get you for that,’ he mumbled, but couldn’t stop himself grinning.

‘Oh,Perry! My hero.’

She carried on giggling, then got into difficulties and began to turn upside down. Someone else, it might have been Locatelli, Edwards or Mimi, started to retreat back inside the airlock. A third flailed his arms about. Nothing about the movement suggested it was happening voluntarily. Apart from Nina and Peter, only one member of the group displayed any signs of controlled movement, turning in a neat half circle and coming down to rest next to the two leaders. O’Keefe had no doubt it was Rogachev. Then, suddenly, they all floated back towards each other as if by magic.

‘A bit treacherous, isn’t it!’ laughed Peter. ‘Navigating in a vacuum is like nothing else. There’s no friction, no current to carry you, no resistance. Once you’re in motion you carry on that way until an adequate counter-impulse occurs, either that or you’ll drift into the sphere of some celestial body and end up as a meteor or make some pretty little crater. Using a thruster properly takes practice; practice you haven’t had. So that’s why, from now on, you don’t need to do anything. The remote control will take over. For the next twenty minutes we’re putting you on control beam, which means you can just sit back and enjoy the view.’

They set off and flew rapidly out over the artificial platform, towards the half-built spaceship. They hovered weightlessly between the floodlight masts.

‘We try to limit EVAs to the absolute minimum of course,’ Nina explained. ‘By now, sunstorm forecasts have become accurate enough for us to take them into account during the planning stages of a mission. And in any case, no astronaut goes outside without a dosimeter. If an unexpected eruption takes place there’s still plenty of time to get back inside the station, and there are dozens of armoured storm shelters all around the outer walls of the OSS if it ever gets tight. But then again, even the most high-tech suit doesn’t provide long-lasting protection against radiation damage, so we’re increasingly reliant on robots.’

‘The flying things over there?’ said Locatelli in a shaky voice, pointing in the direction of two machines with arms but no legs, crossing their path a short distance away. ‘They look like goddamn aliens.’

‘Yes, it’s astonishing. Now that reality has emancipated itself from science fiction, it’s picking up its ideas. We’ve realised, for example, that humanoid machines accommodate their creators’ needs in all kinds of ways.’

‘Creation in our own image,’ said Mimi Parker. ‘Just like the boss did it six thousand years ago.’

Something in those crudely chosen words made O’Keefe stop and think, but he decided to worry about it later. They flew in a wide curve and headed for the spaceship. One of the automatons had anchored itself onto the outer shell like a tick. His two main extremities disappeared inside an open shutter, where they were clearly in the process of installing something; two smaller arms around the machine’s upper body were holding components at the ready. The front side of its helmet-like head was adorned with black glassy peepholes.

‘Can they think?’ asked Heidrun.

‘They can count,’ said Nina. ‘They’re Huros-ED series robots, Humanoid Robotic System for Extravehicular Demands. Incredibly precise and utterly reliable. So far there’s only been one incident involving a Huros-ED, and it wasn’t actually caused by it. But after that their circuit board was extended to include a life-saving program. We use them for everything you can think of: servicing, maintenance, construction. If you end up in outer space, you have a very good chance of being picked up by a Huros and brought back safely.’

Their route led them straight up over one of the floodlight masts and over the back of the spaceship.

‘It takes two to three days to get to the Moon by shuttle. They’re spacious, but just for fun try imagining during the flight that you’re on your way to Mars. Six months in a box like that, the sheer horror of it! Human beings aren’t machines; they need social contact, private lives, space, music, good food, beautiful design, food for the senses. That’s why the spaceship being created here isn’t like any conventional ship. Once it’s completed it will be an astonishing size; here you’re only seeing the main body, almost two hundred metres in length. To put it more precisely, it’s constructed from individual elements which are linked up with one another: partly burnt-out tanks from old space shuttles, partly new, larger models. Together they form the working and command area. There will be laboratories and conference rooms, greenhouses and processing plants. The sleep and training modules rotate on centrifugal outriggers around the main body of the ship to allow the presence of a weak artificial gravity, similar to the gravity on Mars. The next construction stage will be to extend it at the front and back, using masts several hundred metres in length.’

‘Several hundred metres?’ echoed Heidrun. ‘Good grief! How long is the ship going to be?’

‘About a kilometre, or so I’ve heard. And that’s excluding the sun wings and generators. Around two-thirds of them are situated on the front mast, at the peak of which there will be a nuclear reactor to provide the power. Hence the unconventional design: the living quarters have to be at least seven hundred metres away from the source of radiation.’

‘And when will the flight be?’ Edwards enquired.

‘Realists have their sights set on 2030, but Washington would prefer it to be earlier. After all, it’s not just a race to get to the Moon. The USA will do everything they possibly can, even if it means…’

‘… occupying the Red Planet,’ completed Rogachev. ‘We get the picture. Has Orley rented the entire hangar to the Americans?’

‘Part of it,’ said Nina. ‘Other areas of the station have been rented to the Germans, French, Indian and Japanese. Russians too. They’re all running research stations up here.’

‘But not the Chinese?’

‘No, not the Chinese.’

Rogachev dropped the subject. Their flight led over the hangar towards the outer ring with its work stations and manipulators. Nina pointed out the far ends of the masts, which sprouted spherical objects: ‘The site and orbit regulation system. Orb-like tanks feed into the thrusters, which can be used to sink, lift or move the station.’

‘But why?’ asked O’Keefe. ‘I thought it had to stay at exactly this height?’

‘In principle, yes. On the other hand, if a meteorite or a particularly big lump of space debris were to come rushing towards us, we would need to be able to adjust the station’s position a little. Generally speaking we would know about things like that weeks in advance. A vertical shift would usually suffice, but sometimes it makes more sense to get out of the way by moving slightly to the side.’

‘That’s why the anchor station is a swimming island!’ called Mimi Parker. ‘So it can be moved around in synchrony with the OSS!’

‘Exactly,’ said Nina.

‘That’s crazy! And does it happen often? That kind of bombardment?’

‘Rarely.’

‘And you’d know the path of all objects like that?’ O’Keefe dug deeper.

‘Well.’ Peter hesitated. ‘The large ones, yes. But small odds and ends pass through here a million times without us needing to know about it: nano-particles, micro-meteorites.’

‘And what if something like that hits my suit?’ Edwards suddenly sounded as if he was longing to be back inside the station.

‘Then you’d have one more hole,’ said Heidrun, ‘and a nicely positioned one, hopefully.’

‘No, the suit can take that. The armoured plating absorbs nano-particles, and if a pinprick-sized hole really did appear, it wouldn’t have any immediate impact. The fabric is interfaced with a polymer layer; its molecular chains close up as soon as the material reaches its melting point. And the friction heat from the impact of a micrometeorite alone would be enough to do that. You might end up with a small wound, but nothing more than you’d get from stepping on a sea urchin or having a run-in with your cat. The chance of crossing paths with a micrometeorite is far less than, let’s say, your chances of getting eaten by a shark.’

‘How reassuring,’ said Locatelli, his voice sounding strained.

The group had crossed the outer edge of the ring and were now following the course of another pylon. O’Keefe would have liked ideally to turn around and go back. There should have been a fantastic view over the roof to the torus from here. But his spacesuit was like a horse that knew the way and went off all on its own. In front of him the pennons spread like a flock of dark glistening birds with mythical wingspans, keeping watch over these curious patches of civilisation in space. And beyond the solar panels that supplied the station with energy, there was only open space.

‘This section should be of particular interest to you, Mr Locatelli. It’s your stuff!’ said Peter. ‘We’d have needed four to five times as many panels using conventional solar technology.’

Locatelli said something along the lines of that being entirely true. Then he added a few other things. O’Keefe thought he picked up the words revolution and humanity, followed by millstone, which was probably supposed to be milestone. Either way, for some reason it all jumbled up and sounded like guttural porridge.

‘You should be really proud of it, sir,’ said Peter. ‘Sir?’

The object of his praise lifted both arms as if he were about to conduct an orchestra. A few syllables escaped from his throat.

‘Is everything okay, sir?’

Locatelli groaned. Then they heard eruptive retching.

‘B-4, abort,’ said Nina calmly. ‘Warren Locatelli. I’ll accompany him back to the airlock. The group will continue on as planned.’

One day, Mukesh Nair told them, back when he was still a boy in the small village of Loni Kalbhor, they had cut his uncle down from the roof beam of his hut, where he had hanged himself. Suicides amongst farmers were a part of daily life back then, the bitter harvest of the Indian agricultural crisis. Mukesh had wandered through the fallow sugarcane fields, wondering what could be done to stem the flood of cheap imports from the so-called developed nations, whose agriculture lounged around in a feather bed of generous subsidies as it deluged the world with dirt-cheap fruit and vegetables, while Indian farmers saw no other way out of their debt than to take their own life.

He had realised back then that you couldn’t misinterpret globalisation as a process which politicians and companies initiated, accelerated and controlled as they pleased. It wasn’t something that could be turned off and on, not a cause, but the symptom of an idea that was as old as humanity itself: the exchange of culture and wares. Rejecting that would have been as naïve as suing the weather for crop failures. From the day human beings had first ventured into other humans’ territories to trade or make war, it had always been about doing it in such a way that they could participate and profit from it as much as possible. Nair realised that the farmers’ misery couldn’t be blamed on some sinister pact between the First World states, but came down to the failure of the rulers in New Delhi to play to India’s strengths. And one of those strengths – even though, historically, the country had always been synonymous with hunger – was nourishing the world.

Back then, Nair and a group of others had led the Green Revolution. He went to the villages, encouraging the farmers to switch from sugarcane to chilli, tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes. He provided them with seeds and fertiliser, introduced them to new technologies, secured them cheap credit to relieve their debt, pledged minimum purchases and gave them shares in the profit of his supermarket chain, which he built from scratch by utilising modern refrigeration technology, naming it Tomato after his favourite vegetable. Thanks to sophisticated logistics, the perishable goods found their way so quickly from the fields to the counters of the Tomato supermarkets that all the imported products looked old and rotten in comparison. Desperate farmers, who until recently had been faced with the choice of either going into the city as day labourers or stringing themselves up in the attic, became entrepreneurs. Tomato boomed. More and more branches opened, more and more farmers joined forces with Nair’s entourage in the new, emerging India.

‘The inhabitants of our hot, microbe-contaminated metropolises loved our air-conditioned, clean fresh-food markets from the word go,’ said Nair. ‘We had competitors pursuing similar concepts, of course, partly with the support of foreign multi-corporate giants. But I only ever saw my competitors as allies. When it mattered most, we were a hair’s breadth ahead of the rest.’

By now, there were branches of Tomato all over the world. Nair had swallowed up most of his competitors. While India’s agricultural products were now being exported to the most remote corners of the world, Nair had long since gone on to explore a new field of activity, branching out into genetics and blessing the flood-prone coastal areas of his country with a saltwater-resistant rice.

‘And that,’ said Julian, ‘is the very thing that unites us.’

They watched a small harvest robot plucking cherry tomatoes from the vines with its intricate claws, sucking them up inside itself before they had the chance to roll away.

‘We will occupy outer space, colonise the Moon and Mars. Perhaps a little less quickly than we imagined, but it will happen, if only because there are a number of sound reasons why we should. We are standing on the threshold of an era in which the Earth will be only one of the many places where we can live and develop industries.’

Julian paused.

‘But you won’t be able to make a fortune with fruit and vegetables beyond the Earth just yet, Mukesh. The journey towards establishing Tomato branches on the Moon will be a long one! Bernard, you could supply the Moon with water of course – it’s vital for any new development – but you’ll barely make a cent in the process. And as far as your work is concerned, Eva: long-term stays in outer space, on the Moon and on the surface of other planets, will all confront medicine with totally new challenges. And yet research will remain a loss-making business initially, just as I subsidise America’s space travel to help promote the most important resource for a clean and lasting energy supply, and the way I subsidised the development of the necessary reactors. If you want to change the world and be a pioneer the first thing you need to do is spend money. Carl, you made your fortune through clever investments in oil and gas, then switched sides to solar technology, but in space these new technologies wouldn’t yet make any decent turnover. So why should you invest in Orley Enterprises?’

He looked at each of them in turn.

‘I’ll tell you why. Because we’re united by something more than just what we produce, finance and research, and that’s our concern for the wellbeing of mankind. Take Eva for example, who has successfully cultivated synthetic skin, nerves and cardiac muscle cells. Incredibly significant work, reliable, highly lucrative, but that’s only the half of it, because above all it provides hope for coronary-risk patients, cancer patients and burn victims! And Bernard, a man who has provided the poorest of the poor around the globe with access to clean water. Or Mukesh, who opened up a new way of life for India’s farmers and fed the world. Carl, whose investment in renewable energies helps to make its actual use possible. And what’s my dream? You already know. You know why we’re here. Ever since experts began to think about clean, risk-free fusion technology, about how the fuel of the future, helium-3, can be transported from the Moon to Earth, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of providing our planet with this new, inexhaustible source of energy. I’ve gone through many years of deficit to develop reactors until they were ready for production and to build the first functioning space elevator so we could give mankind a springboard into outer space. And do you know what?’

He smiled contentedly and paused for several seconds.

‘All that idealism has paid off. Now I want to and I will make money from it! And you should all join me in doing so! In Orley Enterprises, the most important technology experts in the world. It’s people like us who move or stop this wonderful planet thirty-six thousand kilometres beneath us. It’s down to us. It may not increase your sales of vegetables, water or medication if we join forces, but you’ll be part of the biggest conglomerate in the world. Tomorrow, Orley Energy will become world market leader in the energy sector with its fusion reactors and environmentally friendly power. With the help of more space elevators and space stations, Orley Space will accelerate the conquest of the solar system for mankind’s use, and, together with Orley Travel, expand space tourism too. Believe me, all of that put together will pay off! Everyone wants to go into orbit, everyone wants to go to the Moon, to Mars and beyond, both humans and nations. At the beginning of the century we thought the dream was over, but it’s only just begun, my friends! And yet only very few countries possess the technologies the whole world needs, and Orley Technologies are way ahead of the game on this one. And everyone, everyone without exception, will pay the price!’

‘Yes,’ said Nair in awe. ‘Yes!’

Hanna smiled and nodded.

Everyone will pay the price—

Everything Julian had said, with his usual eloquence and persuasiveness, reduced down to this last sentence in his ears. He had voiced what had been left behind by rulers retreating from the globalisation process, the attempt for economy to become independent, the privatisation of politics: a vacuum that had been filled with businessmen. He defined the future as a product. Even the days ahead wouldn’t change that, quite the opposite in fact. The world would be sold yet again.

Just very differently to how Julian Orley imagined.

I’m back,’ chirped Heidrun.

‘Oh, my darling!’ Ögi’s moustache bristled with delight. ‘Safely and in one piece too, I see. How was it?’

‘Great! Locatelli threw up when he saw his solar panels.’

She floated over and gave him a kiss. The action led to repulsion. She slowly retreated again, reached out to grasp the back of a chair and made her way back, hand over hand.

‘Did Warren get space sick or something?’ asked Lynn.

‘Yes, it was great!’ Heidrun beamed. ‘Nina took him off with her, and after that it was all really nice.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ Donoghue pursed his lips. Red-cheeked and bloated, he rested grandly back against an imaginary throne like Falstaff, his hair so bouffant it looked as though an animal had died on his scalp. ‘It sounds dangerous to me, someone throwing up in their helmet.’

‘Well, you don’t have to go out there,’ said Aileen sharply.

‘Poppycock! I wasn’t saying that…’

‘You’re sixty-five, Chucky. You don’t have to join in on everything.’

‘I said, it sounds dangerous!’ blustered Donoghue. ‘I didn’t say I was scared. I’d still go out there even if I were a hundred. And on the subject of age, have you heard the one about the really old couple and the divorce judge?’

‘Divorce judge!’ Haskin was starting to laugh already. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘So they go to the divorce judge, and he looks at the woman and says: “My dear, how old are you?” “Let’s see,” says the woman, “I’m ninety-five.” “Okay, and you?” The man thinks for a second: ninety-eight! “God almighty,” says the judge, “I don’t believe it. Why on earth would you want to get divorced at your age?” “Well, it’s like this, your honour…”’

Tim snarled. It was hardly bearable. Chucky had been relentlessly setting off comedy firecrackers, one after the other, for the past two hours.

‘“…we wanted to wait until the children had passed away.”’

Haskin did a somersault. Everyone laughed, of course. The joke wasn’t that bad, at least not bad enough for Tim to blame Donoghue alone for his apocalyptic mood. But at that moment he noticed Lynn sitting there as if she’d been turned to stone, as if she were somewhere else entirely. She was gazing straight ahead and was clearly clueless of what was going on around her. Then, all of a sudden, she laughed too.

I could be wrong, he thought. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s starting all over again.

‘So what did you get up to while we were gone?’ Heidrun looked around curiously. ‘Have you been to look around the model station?’

‘Yes, I could re-create it right now from memory,’ bragged Ögi. ‘Amazing building. To tell you the truth I was surprised by the safety standards.’

‘Why?’ asked Lynn.

‘Well, the privatisation of space travel adds to the fear that it’s all been cobbled together too quickly.’

‘But would you be here if you were seriously concerned about that?’

‘That’s true.’ Ögi laughed. ‘But in any case, it was quick. Extraordinarily quick. Aileen and Chuck here could certainly tell you a thing or two about building regulations, surveys and restrictions.’

‘Just one or two?’ growled Chucky. ‘I could go on for days.’

‘When we were designing the Red Planet, they thought the project would be impossible to complete,’ Aileen confirmed. ‘What a bunch of cowards! It took a decade to get from the initial design stage to the start of the construction, and even after that they never left us in peace.’

The Red Planet was Donoghue’s pièce de résistance, a luxury resort in Hanoi modelled on the landscape of Mars.

‘It’s now known as the pièce de résistance of structural engineering,’ she added triumphantly. ‘There’s never been an incident with any of our hotels! But what happens? Whenever you start planning something new, they swarm over you like zombies and try to eat you alive, your enthusiasm, your ideas, even the creative power given to you by the almighty Creator himself. You might think that building up a good record over the years would earn you some credit, but it’s like they take no notice whatsoever of what you’ve achieved so far. Their eyes are dead, their skulls stuffed with regulations.’

Oh man, thought Tim.

‘Yes, yes.’ Ögi rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I know exactly what you mean. In this respect, my dear Lynn, I can’t help but water down all this adulation with a bit of scepticism. As I said, you made the station into a reality extremely quickly. You might even say suspiciously quickly compared to the ISS, which is smaller yet took a lot longer.’

‘Would you like to hear an explanation for that?’

‘At the risk of annoying you…’

‘You’re not annoying me in the slightest, Walo. Pressure from competition has always encouraged sloppiness in the race to be first. But Orley Space doesn’t have any competitors. So we never needed to be quicker than anyone else.’

‘Hmm.’

‘The reason we were quick was perfect planning, which ultimately meant the OSS built itself. We didn’t need to accommodate dozens of notoriously hard-up space authorities, nor wade through bureaucratic quicksand. We only had one partner, the United States of America, and they would even have sold the Lincoln Memorial to break out of the commodity trap. Our agreement fitted on the back of a petrol receipt. America builds up its moon base and supplies technology for mining helium-3, while we bring in marketable reactors, an inexpensive, quick transport system to the Moon and, last but not least, a great deal of money! Getting authorisation from Congress was a walk in the park! It was a win-win situation! One gets to monopolise the reactor trade, the other returns to the peak of space-travelling nations and gets the solution to all their energy problems. Believe me, Walo, with prospects like those on the table, any other option but quickly is completely out of the question.’

‘Well, she’s certainly right about that!’ said Donoghue, his voice like thunder. ‘When has it ever been about whether someone can build something or not? Nowadays it’s always about the damn money.’

‘And the zombies,’ nodded Aileen vigorously. ‘The zombies are everywhere.’

‘Sorry.’ Evelyn Chambers raised her hand. ‘I’m sure you’re right, but on the other hand we’re not here to inflate each other’s egos. This is about investment. And my investment in you is very much linked to trust, so we should put all our cards on the table, don’t you think?’

Tim looked at his sister. She looked open and interested, clearly unaware of what Evelyn Chambers was alluding to.

‘Of course. What’s on your mind?’

‘Slip-ups.’

‘Such as?’

‘Vic Thorn.’

‘Of course. That’s on the agenda.’ Lynn winced, but without batting an eyelid. ‘I was planning to talk about him later, but we can bring it forward.’

‘Thorn?’ Donoghue wrinkled his forehead. ‘Who’s he?’

‘No idea.’ Ögi shrugged. ‘But I’m happy to hear about slip-ups. Even if only to make my peace with my own.’

‘We don’t have any secrets,’ said Haskin. ‘It was all over the news last year. Thorn was part of the first long-term crew on the American moon station. He did an excellent job, so he was recommended for a further six months, as well as being offered a leadership position. He agreed and travelled to the OSS to fly on to the base from there.’

‘That’s right, it rings a bell,’ said Heidrun.

‘Same here.’ Walo nodded. ‘Wasn’t there some kind of problem with an EVA?’

‘With one of the manipulators to be precise. It was blocking the hatch of the shuttle which was supposed to take Thorn’s people to the Moon. It was paralysed mid-movement after being hit by a piece of space debris. So we sent a Huros up…’

‘A what?’ asked Aileen.

‘A humanoid robot. It discovered a splinter in one of the joints, which had apparently caused the manipulator to shut itself down.’

‘Well, that sounds sensible.’

‘Machines don’t concern themselves with concepts of reason.’ Haskin gave her a look as if she’d just suggested never sending robots outside without warm socks on. ‘We agreed to have the joint cleaned, which the Huros wasn’t able to do, so that’s why we sent Thorn and an astronaut up. Except that the manipulator hadn’t turned itself off after all. It had just temporarily fallen into a kind of electro-coma. Suddenly, it woke up and hurled Thorn into space, and it seems his life-support systems were damaged in the process. We lost contact with him.’

‘How awful,’ whispered Aileen, ashen.

‘Well.’ Haskin went silent for a moment. ‘He probably wouldn’t have suffered for long. It’s possible that his visor took a lot of the damage.’

‘Probably? So you didn’t manage to… ?’

‘Unfortunately not.’

‘I always thought you could just dash out after them.’ Aileen spread out the thumb and fingers on her right hand to make the shape of aeroplane wings and glided it through the air. ‘Like in the movies.’

‘Well sure, in the movies,’ said Haskin deprecatingly.

‘But we should also mention that the new generation of the Huros series would probably have been able to save him,’ said Lynn. ‘And the spacesuits’ remote control has been developed further too. With that, we could at least have got Thorn back.’

‘If I remember rightly,’ said Evelyn, ‘there was an investigation.’

‘That’s right.’ Lynn nodded. ‘Which resulted in a case being brought against a Japanese robotics company. They built the manipulator. Clearly it was a case of third-party negligence. Thorn’s death was a tragedy, but the operators of the OSS, that is to say, we, were cleared of any responsibility.’

‘Thanks, Lynn.’ Evelyn looked around at the others. ‘That’s enough of an explanation for me. Don’t you think?’

‘Pioneers have to make sacrifices,’ grumbled Donoghue. ‘The early bird catches the worm, but sometimes he gets eaten by it.’

‘Let’s look around a little more though,’ said Ögi.

‘You’re not convinced?’ asked Lynn.

He hesitated.

‘Yes, I think I am.’

And that was it! A barely noticeable twitch in the corner of her mouth, the meltdown of panic in Lynn’s gaze as…

…she feels the pull, just as she had when she was being dragged down into the abyss, and she wonders with horror what she’s let herself in for. It started weeks ago: she keeps thinking she saw weaknesses in her work where there definitely weren’t any. She’s willing to swear an oath that Julian’s space station will survive longer than all of foolish mankind put together, but she can’t help herself picturing something exploding or falling apart, and only in the lower section. And why?

Because this section is the only one that she, not Julian, designed, the only one that was her responsibility!

And yet the same designers have been working there; the same architects, engineers, construction teams. There are barely any differences between the modules in her station and the others: identical life-support systems, the same method of construction. And yet Lynn is relentlessly tormented by the idea that they might be faulty. The more Julian praises her work, the more the self-doubt eats into her thoughts. She imagines the worst incessantly. Her otherwise commendable caution has been growing into a paranoia of constant mistrust; she searches obsessively for evidence of her failure, and the less she finds, the more nervous she becomes. The OSS Grand has ballooned into a monster of her arrogance, one that will burst like a bubble, condemning dozens of people to their deaths. Cold riveting, strutting, insulation, electrolysis devices, circulation pumps, airlocks, corridors: in all of it, all she sees is the reflection of her own failings. Just the mere thought of the hotel in space and the one on the Moon causes her overwrought brain to erode under the onslaught of adrenalin and cortisol. If, according to theological understanding, fear is the opposite of faith, the separation from the sacred, then Lynn has become the very definition of a heathen. The fear of destroying. The fear of being destroyed. They’re one and the same.

At some point in the depths of her despair, the devil has infiltrated her thoughts and whispered to her that the fear of the abyss can only be overcome by entering it there and then. How do you escape the cycle of fear that something horrific could happen? How can you find a way out before you completely lose your mind? How can you free yourself?

By it happening!

The question, of course, remains what will become of her if her work proves to be transitory. Is she just one of Julian’s inventions, a character in a film? What if Julian stops thinking her, because she proved herself unworthy of being thought? Will she be condemned to perpetual suffering? Eternal damnation? Disappear without a whimper? Or will she have to disappear to be born again, more vividly than ever? If everything by which she defines herself and by which others define her comes to an end, will she, the real Lynn, finally resurface? If she even exists, that is?

‘Miss Orley? Are you unwell?’

‘What’s wrong, dear?’ Aileen’s maternal falsetto tones. ‘You’re as white as a sheet.’

‘Lynn?’ Tim was next to her. The gentle pressure of his fingers on her shoulder. They slowly began to spin, a twofold sibling star.

Lynn, oh, Lynn. What have you let yourself in for?

‘Hey. Lynn!’ White, slender fingers stroked her forehead, violet eyes peering at her. ‘Is everything okay? Have you smoked something funny?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She blinked. ‘You caught me.’

‘Caught you doing what, sweetheart?’

The smile returned to her lips. A horse that knows the way. Tim looked at her searchingly. He wanted to tell her that he knows, but he can’t let himself say anything, can’t ask her! Lynn pulled herself up straight, freeing herself from the suction. She’s won, for now at least.

‘Space sickness,’ she says. ‘Crazy, isn’t it? I never thought it would happen to me, but I guess I was wrong. The lights just seemed to go out.’

‘Then it’s okay for me to admit it.’ Ögi grinned. ‘I’m feeling a bit queasy too.’

‘You?’ Heidrun stared at him. ‘You’re space sick?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘Be grateful I didn’t. The day will come when I’ll have plenty of ailments. Are you feeling better now, Lynn?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ Lynn shrugged off Tim’s hand. ‘Let’s plan the day ahead.’

Her brother looked at her fixedly. Sure, said his look, you’re space sick. And I’m the man in the Moon.

He managed to intercept Julian as he was leaving his suite, an hour before dinner. Tim’s father was wearing a fashionably cut shirt with a tie, his usual jeans and elegant slippers adorned with the emblem Mimi Kri.

‘You can have a fitting with her if you like,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Mimi has developed a collection for stays in environments with zero gravity and reduced gravitational pull. Great, don’t you think?’ He spun around on his axis. ‘Fibre-reinforced, so nothing can flap around. Not even the tie.’

‘Julian, listen—’

‘Oh, before I forget, she brought something along for Amber too. An evening dress. I wanted to surprise her with it, but you can see how much is going on at the moment. I’m not getting a moment’s peace with this mob around. Everything okay, my boy?’

‘No. I have to—’

‘Evening clothes in zero gravity, just think!’ Julian grinned. ‘Isn’t it crazy? Absolutely insane! You could look up all the skirts without these reinforcements. Marilyn Monroe would have stayed just a forgotten orphan, instead of standing on that air-shaft with the wind gusting up from below and everything blowing up, you know.’

‘No, I don’t, actually.’

Julian wrinkled his forehead. He seemed to notice Tim at last, taking in his crumpled overall and flushed face, which didn’t seem to bode well.

‘You’ve probably never heard of the film, right?’

‘Father, I don’t give a toss whose skirt is flying up. Try taking care of your daughter for a change, will you?’

‘I do. And have done ever since she was born, to be precise.’

‘Lynn isn’t well.’

‘Oh, that.’ Julian looked at the time. ‘Yes, she told me. Are you coming along to Kirk with me?’

‘Told you about what?’ asked Tim, confused.

‘That she got space sick.’ Julian laughed. ‘Although she never has been till now. That would annoy me too!’

‘No, wait.’ Tim shook his head impatiently. ‘You don’t understand. Lynn isn’t space sick.’

‘So what is it then?’

‘She’s overstretched. On the brink of a nervous breakdown.’

‘I can understand that you’re concerned, but…’

‘She shouldn’t even be here, Dad! She’s falling apart. For God’s sake, how often do I need to tell you? Lynn is at the end of her tether. She won’t make it. She’s never really dealt with what happened five years ago—’

‘Hey!’ Julian stared at him. ‘Are you crazy? This is her hotel.’

‘And… so what?’

‘It’s her work! Good heavens, Tim! Lynn is CEO of Orley Enterprises, she has to be here.’

‘Has to! Exactly.’

‘Don’t start attacking me! Have I ever forced you to do anything? Did I ever stop you from becoming a teacher and going into your shitty community politics, even though all the doors were open for you at Orley?’

‘That’s not what this is about.’

‘It never is, right? Nor is it ever about the fact that your sister is more successful than you and that, secretly, it annoys the hell out of you.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Too right. Lynn has no problems whatsoever. But you do! You try to make her out to be weak because you haven’t sorted yourself out.’

‘That has to be the most ridiculous nonsense I’ve ever—’ Tim forced himself to calm down and lower his voice. ‘As far as I’m concerned you can believe what you like, I don’t care. Just look out for her! Don’t you remember what happened five years ago?’

‘Of course I do. She was exhausted back then. If you had her workload, you’d—’

‘No, Julian, she wasn’t exhausted. She was burnt out. She was ill, psychologically ill, will you ever get that into your head? Severe depression! A suicide risk!’

Julian looked around as if the walls had ears.

‘Now listen to me, Tim,’ he whispered. ‘Lynn worked hard for all of this. People admire and adore her. This is her big moment. I won’t allow you to mess everything up for her just because you’re seeing ghosts everywhere.’

‘God, you don’t have a clue what’s going on, it’s unbelievable! So stupid!’

‘No, you’re the one who’s stupid. Why did you even come?’

‘To look after her.’

‘Oh.’ Julian let out a mocking laugh. ‘And I thought it might have had something to do with me, just a tiny bit. My apologies for the descent into sentimentality. I’ll speak with her, okay? I’ll tell her what a great job she did of everything, that it’s perfect, that everyone thinks she’s wonderful. Okay?’

Tim stayed silent as Julian, clearly annoyed, floated off towards the airlock. O’Keefe was approaching from the other side.

‘Hey, Tim.’

‘Finn. All good?’

‘Great, thanks. Are you coming to Picard for a drink?’

‘No, I’ll see you later at dinner.’ Tim thought for a moment. ‘I need something fibre-reinforced. A fibre-reinforced tie. You can’t do anything around here without fibre reinforcement.’

The Soirée

The man with the multicoloured eyes was very interested in the art of cooking steaks 36,000 kilometres above the Earth, so that they were sizzling and brown on the outside and pink on the inside, and all without a single drop of meat juices running out.

And he wanted to know what it was that drew mankind to the Moon.

‘Life,’ said Julian. ‘If we find it there, it will fundamentally change our view of the world. I thought you of all people were fascinated by the idea.’

‘And I am. So what do the experts say? Is there life on Mars?’

‘Of course,’ Julian grinned. ‘Spiders.’

‘Spiders from Mars.’ He grinned back. ‘You could do something with that.’

A large number of people from the group, on the other hand, were interested in the man with the multicoloured eyes. Walo Ögi, his greatest admirer, was unfortunately being subjected to a discussion about the economy by Bernard Tautou and Oleg Rogachev, whilst Miranda and Rebecca were deep in discussion, in unfathomable harmony with Momoka Omura, about the therapeutic effect of luxury on Seasonal Affective Disorder. Warren Locatelli was absent. Like Paulette Tautou, he had fallen victim to the combined forces of nervus vagus and diverse neurotransmitters, which, via the area of his brainstem known as the nausea centre, had led to the torrential emptying of his stomach.

This aside, it was a wonderful dinner.

The lights had been dimmed, allowing the Earth to shine through the glass floor like a huge Chinese lantern. For the first and only time, there was alcohol: champagne from slender goblets topped with sucking teats. Just like the previous evening, the food was of astonishing quality. Julian had flown in a highly decorated Michelin-starred chef for the duration of the trip, a German from Swabia called Johannes King, who had immediately subjected the kitchen to a three-hundred-per-cent increase in efficiency, conjuring up amazing culinary feats such as truffle-infused creamed vegetables, with genuine Périgord truffles, of course, a dish that had gone through endless tests to ensure it could cope with the perils of zero gravity.

‘Because, obviously, sauce, or anything liquid or creamy, develops a life of its own in zero gravity.’ The chef was just finishing his round of the table. He was an exuberant, lively character with great coordination, and seemed to take to weightlessness like a fish to water. ‘Unless its consistency is created in such a way that it sticks to the fish or vegetables. But if it’s too concentrated it will impair the taste, so it’s a real balancing act.’

Tautou suggested that the Guide Michelin should be extended with a chapter on ‘Non-Terrestrial Regions’. What could be more apt than awarding their stars up here? But he didn’t have the effrontery to pour this thin analogy into each person’s ear; his enthusiasm for it would gradually tire as the game terrine with cranberries, fillet steaks, potato gratin and an unctuous tiramisu were passed around, one after the other.

‘And no garlic, no beans, or anything that causes wind! Escaping bodily gases are a real problem in close conditions like these; people have become violent for far less. Also, what you’re eating here would seem over-seasoned on Earth, but in space your taste buds are weakened, on the back burner so to speak. Oh, yes, and make sure you eat nice and slowly. Pick up every bite carefully, lead it to your mouth with intent, put it in quickly and decisively, then chew carefully.’

‘Well, the steaks were works of God, anyway!’ said Donoghue approvingly.

‘Thank you.’ King made a bow, which resulted in him tipping over and doing a somersault. ‘In actual fact they were sterile synthetic products from the molecular kitchen. We’re incredibly proud of them, if I may say so.’

For the next ten minutes, Donoghue fell silent, in a state of deep contemplation.

O’Keefe suckled at the champagne.

He made an effort to maintain his peeved expression. He had noted happily that Heidrun was seated next to him, or rather that her legs were wedged into the braces provided for that purpose. As much as it pleased him, though, he was punishing her with his lack of attention, chatting pointedly with the surprise guest. For her part, she made no attempt to speak to him. It was only once the group began to compare their experiences of the day and the general conversation broke up into individual exchanges that he finally deigned to address her with a hissed remark:

‘What the hell were you thinking of this morning?’

She hesitated. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Shoving me out of the airlock.’

‘Oh.’ Heidrun fell silent for a while. ‘I get it. You’re angry.’

‘No, but I’m wondering whether you’ve taken leave of your senses. That was pretty dangerous.’

‘Nonsense, Finn. I may act like a big kid sometimes, but I’m not crazy. Nina had already told me yesterday that the suits were remote-controlled. Do you seriously think they would leave all-inclusive holidaymakers, people whose greatest sporting achievement was getting a badge for swimming two hundred metres, to their own devices out there?’

‘So you didn’t want to kill me? That’s comforting.’

Heidrun smiled mysteriously. ‘Sweetheart, I just wanted to find out where Perry Rhodan stops and Finn O’Keefe begins.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it’s quite fitting that you play him as a bit of a dope.’

‘Now hang on a minute!’ protested O’Keefe. ‘A heroic dope.’

‘Yes, of course. And it never took you long to work out whether there were any females in the vicinity who might be willing to mate with you. Pleased with yourself?’

He grinned. As he paused, he heard Eva Borelius say: ‘But that’s not a theological question, Mimi, it’s about the origins of our civilisation. Why do people want to cross borders, what are they looking for in space? I sometimes feel inclined to join in the chorus of anger clamouring about the trillions of people who are starving, who have no access to fresh water—’

‘By now, sure,’ he heard Tautou exclaim from another conversation, only to be put back in his place by a pistol-shot retort of ‘No, you haven’t!’ from Karla Kramp.

‘—while all the fun up here devours vast amounts of money. And yet we have to research. Our entire culture is based upon exchange and expansion. At the end of the day, what we’re looking for in the unknown is ourselves, our meaning, our future, just like Alexander von Humboldt, like Stephen Hawking—’

‘I wouldn’t be here if I had anything against the spread of the human race,’ said Mimi Parker sharply.

‘Well, it sure sounded like it just then.’

‘No, not at all! I’m just contesting the bigoted desire to discover something that’s already obvious. I, for my part, am just here to marvel at His work.’

‘Which, according to you, is six thousand years old.’

‘Well, it could be ten thousand. Let’s say up to ten thousand – after all, we’re not dogmatists.’

‘But no more than that? Not at least a few little million?’

‘Absolutely not. What I expect to find out here—’

Aha, thought O’Keefe. I knew it. Created in our own image, just as the boss did it six thousand years ago. Mimi was here to represent the creationists.

‘And what do you expect to find here?’ he asked Heidrun, who was laughing at something Carl Hanna had just said.

‘Me?’ She turned her head. Her long white ponytail swung softly behind her. ‘I’m not here to expect anything.’

‘Then why?’

‘Because my husband was invited. Whenever that happens, people get me too, whether they like it or not.’

‘Okay, fine, but now you’re here?’

‘Hmm. Regardless. I don’t set much store by expectations. Expectations blind people. I prefer to be surprised. And so far it’s working out great, in any case.’ She hesitated and leaned in a little closer. ‘And you?’

‘Nothing. I’m just doing my job.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What is there to understand? I’m here to do my job, and that’s it.’

‘Your – job?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mean you’re just letting yourself be used by Julian?’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Good God, Finn.’ Heidrun shook her head slowly, in disbelief. He suddenly felt embarrassed, getting the feeling he’d pressed the wrong button. ‘You’re such a jerk! Every time I’m just starting to like you—’

‘Why? What have I done this time?’

‘This detachment act of yours! Nothing affects you, right? Hat pulled down over your face, standing aside from the rest. That’s exactly what I meant before: Who is O’Keefe?’

‘He’s sitting right in front of you.’

‘Bullshit! You just have this vague notion of who O’Keefe is supposed be, if he wants to make everyone think he’s really cool. A rebel, whose problem is that he doesn’t actually have anything to rebel against, except boredom perhaps.’

‘Hey!’ He leaned forward. ‘What in God’s name gives you the idea I’m like that?’

‘This stupid attitude.’

‘You said yourself that—’

‘I said that I didn’t have any expectations, which means I’m open to everything. That’s quite a lot to be going on with. You, on the other hand, made out that it was nothing more than a job to you. That you’re just buying into the story that Julian’s lovely and the Moon is round, and then we’ll all hold hands until the cameras get turned off and we can finally go and get pissed. That’s lousy, Finn! Are you really that jaded? Do you really intend to tell me, in all seriousness, that you’re just in it for the money Julian’s throwing your way?’

‘Nonsense. I’m not getting paid for it.’

‘Okay then, last chance: What are you doing up here? What do you feel when you – well, when you look down at the Earth?’

O’Keefe paused as he gave it some thought. He stared intently through the glass floor below. The problem was, he couldn’t think of a convincing answer. The Earth was the Earth.

‘Distance,’ he said finally.

‘Distance.’ She seemed to be tasting the word. ‘And? Good distance? Bad distance?’

‘Oh, Heidrun. Call it attitude if you really want to, but I just want to be left in peace. You think I’m some bored, arrogant type who’s lost any interest in getting into a debate. Maybe you’re right. Today I’m soft and compliant, the nice Finn. What are you expecting?’

‘I don’t know. What are you expecting?’

‘Why are you so interested? We hardly know each other.’

‘Because I was – still am – interested in you.’

‘Well, I don’t know. All I know is that there are directors who make wonderful films on minuscule budgets, against all the odds. Other people play music no one wants to listen to, apart from a few crazy types perhaps, but they’re unwavering in what they do, they would die for it. Some people can barely afford the hooch that keeps them writing, but if you happen to stumble upon something of theirs online and download it, you’re strangely moved by how humanity and unmarketability seem to come together, and it makes you realise that great emotions always originate in the small, the intimate, the desperate. As soon as an orchestra gets involved, it turns to pathos. If you look at it that way, even the most beautiful woman would be no match for the lousiest hooker. No luxury can give you such a feeling of being alive as getting plastered with the right people, or touching your broken nose when you’ve picked a fight with the wrong ones. I stay in the best hotels in the world, but being in a mouldy back room with someone who has a dream, in some neighbourhood no sensible person would go of their own accord, well, that moves me much more than flying to the Moon.’

Heidrun thought for a moment.

‘It’s lovely when you can afford to romanticise poverty,’ she commented.

‘I know what you mean. But that’s not what I’m doing. I don’t come from a poor background. I don’t have a message, I’m not fuelled by anger at society, I haven’t been sent up here by some political party or other. Perhaps that means I’m not committed enough, but it really doesn’t seem that way to me. We have a good time when we film Perry Rhodan, that’s for sure. I’m not about to turn down the money, either. And, recently, I’ve even started to enjoy being a nice guy, a rich nice guy who can fly to the Moon for free. I see all that and think, hey look, that’s little Finn. Then I meet women who want to be with me because they think I’m part of their life. Which is true, to some extent. I accompany them through this little, or, as far as I’m concerned, great life, I’m with them the whole time, in the cinema, in magazines, on the internet, in pictures. At night, when they lie awake, they entrust their secrets to me. During times of crisis in their lives, my films are important to them. They read interviews with me and after every second sentence they think: Wow, he understands me! He knows exactly what I’m about! Then when they meet me they’re convinced they’re standing there with a friend, a kindred spirit. They think they know me, but I don’t know them. I mean everything to them, but they don’t mean anything to me, not in the slightest. Just because my picture was hanging on their wall when they had their first orgasm, just because they may have been thinking about me, it doesn’t mean I was there. They’re not part of my life. There’s no connection between us.’ He paused. ‘And now tell me, what was it like when you first met Walo? What did you think? Oh, man, interesting, someone I don’t know. Who is he, I have to find out. Is that how it was?’

‘Yes, pretty much.’

‘And he thought the same. You see. The magic of the first impression. I, on the other hand, meet strangers labouring under the delusion that they know me. In order to completely let go of this life I would have to stop taking part in it, but it’s just too much fun. So I sing and dance along but I keep my distance.’

‘Well, that’s fame,’ said Heidrun. It didn’t sound mocking this time, more as if she was surprised by his list of banalities. But that’s exactly how things were. Banal. On the whole, there was nothing more banal than fame.

‘Yes’ he said. ‘It sure is.’

‘So we haven’t managed to come up with anything more original than what the doctor just said. Everyone’s looking for themselves in the unknown.’

He hesitated. Then he smiled his famous, shy smile.

‘Perhaps we’re looking for our soulmates.’

Heidrun’s violet eyes lingered on his, but she didn’t answer. They looked at each other, entangled in a strange, cocoon-like mood which excited O’Keefe as much as it unsettled him. He felt a twinge of awkwardness. It looked as though he was about to fall head over heels for a cumulative lack of melanin.

He jumped, almost relieved, as Julian clapped his hands.

‘Dear friends, I didn’t dare hope.’

Silence fell.

‘And I swear I didn’t ask him to. I merely suggested keeping a guitar handy, just in case! And now he’s even brought his own along.’

Julian smiled around at them. His gaze wandered over to the man with the multicoloured eyes.

‘Back in ’69, when I had just turned three years old, he went to the movies and saw A Space Odyssey, which would later become my favourite film, and paid immediate tribute to its maker. Almost a quarter of a century later I had my own opportunity to honour Kubrick, modelling my first restaurant on the design of his space station, and I called it Oddity, in honour of the great artist we have with us here. Kubrick lived in Childwickbury Manor at the time, the estate near London that he hardly ever left. He also hated aeroplanes. I suspect that once he moved to the United Kingdom from New York he never put any more than a hop, skip and a jump between himself and English soil. And he was said to be very shy, so I never expected to see him in Oddity. But to my surprise, he turned up there one evening, when David was sitting at the bar too. We all talked, and I ended up blurting out the fact that I wanted to take them both to the Moon with me, that all they had to do was say yes and we’d be on our way. Kubrick laughed and said the lack of comfort alone would horrify him. He thought the whole thing was a joke of course. I had the presumption to claim that, by the turn of the millennium, I would have built a spaceship with all comforts and mod cons, of course without the slightest idea of how I would go about achieving such a thing. I had just turned twenty-six, was producing films, more bad ones than good, and was trying my hand at being an actor. I’d brought a new production of Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon to the big screen with David in the lead role, was winning favour with the critics and public alike, and was also just starting to feel my way in the field of gastronomy. Orley Enterprises was still very much in the distant future. I was, however, a passionate flyer and dreamed of the space travel that also fascinated Kubrick. So I finally managed to talk him and David into a bet: if I succeeded in building the promised spaceship by the year 2000, the two of them had to come on the flight. If not, I would finance one hundred per cent of Kubrick’s next film and David’s forthcoming album.’

Julian ran his fingers through his beard, transported back to the past.

‘Unfortunately, Stanley died before that could happen, and my life changed fundamentally after that evening. I only produce films as a sideline now. Orley Travel was born in a small travel bureau in Soho which I took over at the beginning of the nineties. I owned two airlines and bought an abandoned studio complex to work on the development of space vessels and space stations. With the foundation of Orley Space we pushed into the technology market. Some of the best brains from NASA and ESA worked for us, experts from Russia, Asia and India, engineers from Germany: because we paid higher salaries, created better research conditions, and were more enthusiastic, speedy and efficient than their old employers. By then, no one doubted that state space travel was in urgent need of some live-cell therapy from the private market, but I had set myself the goal of actually taking its place! I wanted to usher in the dawn of the true space era, without the hesitancy of the bureaucrats, the chronic lack of money and the dependence on political change. We offered prize money for young designers, had them develop rocket-propelled aircraft, and expanded our tourism range to sub-orbital flights. I’ve flown machines like that myself many times. And maybe it wasn’t yet a proper space flight, but it was a brilliant beginning. Everyone wanted to come! Space tourism promised astronomic yield, that is if we could succeed in reducing the start-up costs.’ He laughed softly. ‘Well, in spite of that I lost the bet initially. I didn’t make it by the year 2000. So I offered to settle my debt with David. But he didn’t want me to. All he said was: Keep your money and send me the ticket when it’s ready. The only thing I can say today is that his presence on the OSS is a great honour and makes me deeply happy. And whatever one could add about his greatness, his importance to our culture and the lease of life he has given to so many generations, his music can express that much better than I ever could. So now I’ll shut up and hand over to – Major Tom.’

The silence that followed was almost sacred. A guitar was passed along. The lights had been dimmed further still during Julian’s speech and the Pacific was shimmering as if it had just been polished. Through the oval side window, scattered sugar glowed against a black backdrop.

Looking back later, O’Keefe saw those seconds when David Bowie launched into the opening chords of ‘Space Oddity’ – alternating between Fmaj7 and Em, soft and muted at first, then swelling powerfully, as if one were nearing the bustle of activity around the launch pad from the indifferent silence of space, right up to the moment when ground control and Major Tom enter into their memorable dialogue – as what may have been the last, and perhaps the only really harmonious moment of their journey. In his naïve happiness he forgot what Orley’s venture was really about: catapulting people from the globe into a hostile environment, onto a satellite which, despite having spiritualised its previous visitors, had not yet made a single one of them want to return. He was keenly aware that every search for meaning which involved leaving the Earth would only culminate in his looking round at it at every opportunity, and he suddenly pictured himself getting so far away from it that it was completely out of sight, wretched and flooded with fear.

And the stars look very different today—

And when Tom’s ballad finally came to an end, and the unlucky Major had been lost to the void of his inflated expectations, he felt, instead of the enchantment he had hoped for, a strange kind of disillusionment, almost like homesickness, although they were only 36,000 kilometres away from home. The right-hand side of the planet had begun to darken. He saw Heidrun inhale the moment with her lips half open, her gaze alternating between Bowie and the sea of stars on the other side of the window, while his was drawn over to her as if by magic. He realised that the Swiss woman had arrived in herself a long time ago, that she would happily travel to the very edge of the universe, because she carried her home in and with her, that she had certainly reached a much higher level of freedom than him, and he found himself wishing he were upstairs above some Dublin pub, being held in someone’s arms on a threadbare mattress.

It seems quite a few people had the same idea that night.

Perhaps it was the way Amber had comforted him as he’d cried on her shoulder about Julian’s ignorance that had stimulated Tim physically as well as emotionally; perhaps it was her kisses, the tautness in her arms, the springy elasticity she’d acquired in the gym; perhaps it was because, after so many years of mundane married life, his fantasies still revolved exclusively around his wife to the extent that he wanted to caress no other behind but hers, glide his hand into no other delta but hers – which meant he was about as suited to infidelity as a steam engine was to leaving the tracks – and even in those moments when he was pleasuring himself, he wanted to imagine no one but her; perhaps it was because her divine looks had not been tainted by the passing of the years – praise to the genes! – and because the buoyancy of zero gravity had returned her breasts to that legendary state which, at the beginning of their relationship, had made him feel as though he were grasping ripe melons; perhaps it was the way his attempt to fumble apart the clasps on her bathrobe had resulted in his being propelled into the opposite corner of the module, which had only turned him on all the more, as she lay there laughing amongst the swinging folds of the open robe, like an angel ready to sin – but whatever the reason was, his body was defying all the adversity of zero gravity, the low supply of blood to the lumbar region, the disorientation and light sense of nausea, by producing a true space rocket of an erection.

He paddled over and grasped hold of her shoulders. Peeling her out of her bathrobe was one thing, but Amber’s attempt to free him from his trousers and T-shirt failed as they drifted apart, which they did again and again until he ended up wriggling naked above the bed, heading helplessly for the ceiling. She looked at his galactic erection with visible interest, as helpless as she was amused.

‘So what do we do with that now?’ she laughed.

‘There must be a way.’ He was determined. ‘People must have thought about this.’

‘Hopefully. It’d be a shame if they hadn’t.’

Tim did a handstand and ploughed over to her. This time, he managed to get a grip on her hips and buried his head between her legs, which she spread and then immediately closed again to keep his head in place. As a result, the blood rushed to his ears. Circling his tongue, he pressed ahead, capturing the tiny mound beneath the small forest, the density of which threatened to take his breath away as he pressed his nose inside her out of fear of ending up at the other end of the room again, becoming intoxicated by the blend of their lust and countering her first, blissful sighs – provided that his ears, packed tightly between her thighs, weren’t deceiving him – with muffled agreement. An overdose of oxygen seemed to mingle with the cabin air – or was it the lack of oxygen that suddenly made him feel as high as a schoolboy? Who cared! Joyfully exhilarated, he made his way deeper inside, panting, grunting, the tip of his tongue flying dedicatedly around. At the moment when the tropical dampness of deep-lying realms opened up to him, believing he heard a declaration of love burst forth, he couldn’t hold back and mumbled a ‘Me too, oh, me too’, but got a puzzling response.

‘Ow! Ouch!’

Something had clearly gone wrong. Tim looked up. In doing so, he made the mistake of loosening his grip. Amber flailed around as if she were drowning, kicking him from her. Pushed away, he saw that she was rubbing her head, and that it was in the immediate vicinity of the edge of the desk. Aha. He should have thought of that, that they would drift away in the heat of the moment. Lesson number one: it wasn’t enough to clasp on to each other, they needed to fix themselves within the room too. He couldn’t help but laugh. Amber wrinkled her nose and frowned, then his gaze fell on something that could offer a solution.

‘Look!’

‘What?’ She dug the fingers of her right hand into his hair and tried to bite his nose, which resulted in her doing a somersault. Tim hopped over to the bed like a frog, pulling Amber, still head over heels, along with him.

‘Buckling ourselves in?’ she snorted mockingly. ‘How unerotic. It’d be like doing it in a car. We’ll hardly be able to move—’

‘No, silly, not with the sleeping belt. Look!’

Amber’s expression brightened. Above the bed were some handles, mounted a little distance apart from one another.

‘Wait. I think I saw something that might go with them.’

She hurried over to the cupboard, opened it, rummaged around and unearthed several long bands made from a rubber-like material. They had a red, yellow and green pattern and were adorned with a slogan.

‘Love Belt,’ she read.

‘So there you go,’ grinned Tim. ‘People did think about it.’ For the first time since they’d set off on the journey, he felt carefree and playful, a sensation which just an hour ago he had thought was gone for good. Lynn didn’t become entirely insignificant, of course, but just retreated to an insignificant province of his cortex, one that wasn’t attending to Amber’s scent and the throbbing desire to fuck her. ‘It looks like we have to fasten you by the wrists, my darling. No, by the hands and feet. Like in the torture chambers of the Holy Inquisition.’

She started to thread the bands through the handles.

‘I think you misunderstood,’ she said. ‘You’re the one getting tied up.’

‘Now just a minute! We need to talk about this first.’

‘Do you think he wants to talk about it?’ she asked, gesturing her head at his royal member. ‘I think he wants to do something else, and very quickly too.’

One after the other, she knotted the rubber bands around his wrists and, giggling and snorting, made her way down to fasten his feet, until he was hung in the middle of the room with his extremities stretched out. He wriggled his knees and elbows with curiosity, noticing that the bands were highly elasticated. He could move around, and generously too. It was just stopping him from flying away.

‘Do you think this was Julian’s idea?’ he asked.

‘I’d be willing to bet on it.’ Amber hovered towards him as if she were on a control beam, clasped his shoulders and slung her legs around his hips. For a moment, her sex balanced on his, like a trapeze artist on the nose of a sea lion.

‘In my opinion, sexual positions are the most demanding manoeuvres in the world,’ she whispered as she pressed herself against him, lowered herself and drew him inside her.

Seemingly quite a few people had the same idea, but only a few managed to put it into action. Eva Borelius and Karla Kramp also found the straps and figured out what to do with them, as did Mimi Parker and Marc Edwards. However, Edwards found the redistribution of over half a litre of blood from the lower to upper bodily regions a little harder to handle than Tim had, whilst Paulette Tautou would most likely have held Bernard’s head down the now-so-familiar toilet bowl if he had come near her with any intentions of that sort.

Wisely, Tautou did no such thing. Instead, in consideration of Paulette’s miserable condition, he decided that they should embark on the journey home.

Suite 12 was the scene of similar suffering, the only difference being that Locatelli would never have capitulated to something as mundane as space sickness. Peaceful silence reigned in Suite 38, where the Ögis lay snuggled up to one another like field-mice in winter. One floor above, Sushma and Mukesh Nair were peacefully enjoying the sight of night falling over the Isla de las Estrellas. In Suite 17, Aileen Donoghue had put in her earplugs, allowing Chuck to snore at the top of his lungs.

On the opposite side of the torus, Oleg Rogachev was staring out of the window while Olympiada Rogacheva stared straight ahead.

‘Do you know what I’d like to know?’ she murmured after a while.

He shook his head.

‘How someone ends up like Miranda Winter.’

‘You don’t end up like that,’ he said, without turning round. ‘You’re born like it.’

‘I don’t mean the way she looks,’ snorted Olympiada. ‘I’m not stupid. I just want to know how someone gets to be so impregnable. So completely pain-free. It’s as if she’s a walking immune system against every kind of problem, she’s like nonchalance personified – I mean, seriously, she’s even given names to her breasts!’

Rogachev turned his head slowly.

‘No one’s stopping you from doing the same.’

‘Perhaps a certain amount of it is down to stupidity,’ ruminated Olympiada, as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘You know, I really do believe that Miranda is quite dumb. Oh, what am I saying, she hasn’t got two brain cells to rub together. I have no doubt that she’s lacking any kind of education, but perhaps that’s an advantage. Perhaps it’s good to be stupid, desirable even. Dumb and naïve and a little bit calculating. You feel less that way. Miranda loves only herself, whereas it seems to me that every single day I’m pouring all my feelings, all my strength into a vase that’s full of holes. Your meanness would be wasted on someone like Miranda, Oleg, like a pinprick in blubber.’

‘I’m not mean to you.’

‘Oh, no?’

‘No. I’m just uninterested. You can’t hurt someone you have no interest in.’

‘And you suppose that’s not mean?’

‘It’s the truth.’ Rogachev glanced at her for a second. Olympiada had burrowed into her sleeping bag and was now belted in and safely out of reach. For a moment he wondered what it might be like if the sack burst open the next morning to reveal a butterfly, an astonishing feat for his rather retarded imagination. But Olympiada wasn’t a caterpillar, and he had no intention of weaving her into a cocoon. ‘Our marriage was a strategic move. I knew it, your father knew it, and you knew it too. So please stop torturing yourself.’

‘One day you’ll fall, Oleg,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll end up like a rat. A damn rat in the gutter.’

Rogachev turned to gaze again out of the window, strangely unmoved by the planet darkening below him.

‘Just get on with it and take a lover,’ he said tonelessly.

Miranda Winter had no intention of heading off to bed any time soon, much to the joy of Rebecca Hsu, who suffered from her inability to cope with being alone. Except that she was alone. A poor, rich woman, as she went to great pains to convince herself, twice divorced, with three daughters of whom she saw shamefully little. A woman who hung around in the company of others until even the last few closed their eyes, after which she would make calls across all the time zones thanks to the world-spanning structure of her group of companies, until even she lost the fight against tiredness. The whole day through, whenever their strictly organised schedule allowed, she had been discussing marketing plans by phone, debating campaign strategies, deliberating purchases, sales and shares. Keeping an eye on her empire: a control freak who was tormented by the thought that she’d driven husbands and daughters away with her manic working habits.

At least she could discuss the lack of husbands with Miranda without falling head first into melancholy afterwards. Besides, some of the beakers of Moët et Chandon had miraculously turned up in Miranda’s cabin, which particularly pleased Rebecca, since she had owned the brand for some time now.

Finn O’Keefe didn’t know what to think or feel, so he listened to music for a while then fell asleep.

Evelyn Chambers lay awake – if it could be called lying, that is.

She didn’t feel the slightest inclination to buckle herself onto the bed like some raving lunatic. She had discovered the rubber bands by chance and anchored herself to the handles near the front of the window, hoping to enjoy the sensation of zero gravity in her sleep too. But when she closed her eyes her body seemed to speed up as if it were on a roller-coaster, trying to loop the loop, and she started to feel sick.

She reached up to free her shackled ankles from the bands, which was no easy task. It was only then that she noticed the inscription: Love Belt. Suddenly realising what they were really intended for, a wave of regret washed over her at not being able to appropriately crown the extravagant experience of zero gravity. Intrigued, she wondered whether the others were doing it, and then – rather boldly – whom she might be able to do it with! Her thoughts darted from Miranda Winter to Heidrun Ögi and then back again, based on the fact that Heidrun wasn’t available, although admittedly neither was Miranda, if only due to lack of inclination.

Rebecca Hsu? Oh, for heaven’s sake!

Her desire subsided as quickly as it had risen. And yet she had been so adamant, after her bisexuality had cost her the role of governor, that she was going to enjoy herself properly now. She was still America’s most popular and influential chat-show host. In the wake of her political Waterloo she no longer felt bound to any conservative code. What had remained of her marriage barely justified professing monogamy, especially as her so-called husband was pouring their joint money into his constantly changing acquaintances. Not that that bothered her. Their love had gone down the drain years ago, but she didn’t want to go to bed with anyone and everyone, even if she was consumed by lust.

Although perhaps in exceptional circumstances—

Finn O’Keefe. It was worth a try. It would certainly be fun to snare him of all people, but the thought quickly soured.

Julian?

He clearly loved flirting with her. But on the other hand Julian’s job meant he flirted with everyone. Still. He was unattached, apart from the affair with Nina Hedegaard, if they were even still having one and it wasn’t just her reading too much into it. If she yielded to Julian’s advances there would be little danger of hurting anyone else, and they would have fun, she was sure of that. Perhaps something more might even come out of it. And if not, that was fine too.

On the spur of the moment, she dialled the number of his suite.

But no one answered, the screen stayed dark. Feeling foolish all of a sudden, like a sparrow pecking around beneath restaurant tables for food from other people’s plates, she crawled hurriedly into her sleeping bag.

‘You had them hanging on your every word.’

‘But I wasn’t even the first.’

Julian raised his eyebrows.

‘2013,’ said Bowie. ‘Chris Hadfield – this ISS astronaut. He was the first person in the world to sing “Space Oddity” in space.’

‘Correct, and it wasn’t bad at all. But you’re the original. You had to come up here and sing it!’

Bowie smiled. ‘Obviously.’

‘And you’re quite sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘Tautou told me that Madame wants them to come back to earth together. We would have room.’ Julian sucked at his bottle. ‘Oh, nonsense, forget the Tautous! We’d have room even if they did come. I’ve always got room for you.’

They were the only ones left in the dimly lit Picard, sucking at their alcohol-free cocktails. Bowie rolled the bottle between his fingers thoughtfully.

‘Thanks, Julian. But I’ll pass.’

‘But why? It’s your chance to go to the Moon. You’re the star man, you’re that guy in The Man Who Fell to Earth, you’re Ziggy Stardust! Who, if not you? You have to go to the Moon.’

‘Well, for a start I’m seventy-eight years old.’

‘And? You can’t tell. You once said you wanted to live to be three hundred. Compared to that you’re still a kid.’

Bowie laughed.

‘So?’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Are you going to get the money together for a second lift?’

‘Of course,’ boomed Julian. ‘Shall we bet on it?’

‘No more bets. What’s going on with the Chinese anyway? I heard they’re pestering you with offers.’

‘Officially they’re doing nothing of the sort, but between ourselves they’re kowtowing like mad. Does the name Zheng Pang-Wang mean anything to you?’

‘Not off the top of my head.’

‘The Zheng Group.’

‘Ah!’ Bowie wrinkled his brow. ‘Yes, I think it does actually. They’re a technology company too, right?’

‘Zheng is the driving force behind Beijing’s space travel. An entrepreneur, bound to the Party, which amounts to the same thing. He never misses a single opportunity to infiltrate my ranks, but I’ve got my defences up, so he tries to do it by plotting. Obviously the Chinese would love to woo me away and have me all to themselves. They’ve got money, more than the Americans, but they don’t have the patents for the lift, or the brainpower to build fusion reactors that don’t immediately shut themselves down again. A few weeks ago I met old Pang-Wang in Paris. A nice guy really. He tried to tempt me with Chinese money, and appealed to my cosmopolitan heart by saying that a clean energy supply would be of benefit to the whole world. He asked whether I didn’t think it was indecent that all the money from helium-3 was going to the Americans. So I asked him what the Chinese would think of it if I went on to sell the patents to the Russians, Indians, Germans, French, Japanese and Arabs.’

‘I’d be more interested to know what the Americans would think of that.’

‘The question is actually a little different: Who has the whip hand? In my opinion, I do, but of course I would create completely new geopolitical relationships. And do I want that? For the most part, I’ve had a kind of symbiotic relationship with America, to our mutual advantage. Recently, since the Moon crisis, Washington has been haunted by the ghosts of the Little Depression of 2008 to 2010. They’re worried things might get out of hand if they give that much power to one single company. Which is ridiculous: I gave them the power! The power to stake out their claim up there. Using my means, my know-how! But it seems the desire to have more control over companies is rampant.’ Julian snorted. ‘Instead of which the governments should be putting their energies into infrastructure, healthcare and education. They should be building streets, schools, houses, old people’s homes, but the private economy even has to help them out with that, so what do they have to crow about? Governments have proved incapable of pushing forward global processes, they only know how to squabble, hesitate and make lazy compromises. They didn’t manage to get to grips with environmental protection in that laughable treaty, they demand sanctions against corrupt and warfaring states in their shaky voices, despite the fact that no one’s bothering to listen, so they just stock up on nuclear arms and impose trading blocks on each other’s markets. The Russians don’t have any money left for space travel now that Gazprom is hanging in the balance, but it would still be enough to give to me and the Americans for permission to use the next space elevator. Then we’d have another player on the Moon with us, and as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing.’

‘But America doesn’t agree.’

‘Well, no, because they’ve got me. The fact is, together we don’t need anyone else, and in a situation like that Washington thinks they can get away with anything and demand more transparency.’

‘So what’s your plan? Bringing the Russians over to your side without America’s blessing?’

‘If America doesn’t want to play with them and continues to block my ideas, then yes – as you can see, I’ve invited some very illustrious guests. Zheng is right, but not in the way he thinks. I’ve had it up to here with the sponsorship failing to make headway! Competition is invigorating for business. Sure, it would be a bit shabby to run from the Americans to the Chinese now – they’re all the same idiots everywhere when it comes down to it – but offering the lift to all nations, now that’s got a ring to it.’

‘And you said as much to Zheng?’

‘Yes, and he thought he’d misheard. He certainly never wanted to unleash that kind of change in perspective, but he was overestimating his contribution. I’d had the idea for a long time already. He just made me more determined to do it.’

Bowie fell silent for a while.

‘Well, I’m sure you know you’re playing with fire,’ he said.

‘With the sun’s fire,’ said Julian serenely. ‘With reactor fire. I’m used to fire.’

‘Do your American friends know about your plans?’

‘They may have an idea, to a certain extent. It’s no secret whom I go trotting off to the Moon with.’

‘You sure know how to make enemies.’

‘I’ll travel with whomever I like. It’s my elevator, my space station, my hotel up there. They’re far from happy about it of course, but I don’t care. They should make me better offers and stop their control games.’ Julian suckled noisily at his bottle and licked his lips with his tongue. ‘Delicious, isn’t it? On the Moon we’ll have wine with an alcohol substitute. Totally insane! 1.8 per cent, but it tastes like really hard stuff. Are you sure you want to miss out on that?’

‘You don’t give up, do you?’ Bowie laughed again.

‘Never.’ Julian grinned.

‘But you’re too late. Don’t get me wrong: I love life, and it’s definitely too short, I agree with all that. Three hundred years would be wonderful, especially in times like these! But it’s just that I—’

‘—ended up being turned from an alien into an earthling after all,’ finished Julian with a smile.

‘I was never anything else.’

‘You were the man who fell to earth.’

‘No. I was just someone who tried to get to grips with his difficulties around people by disguising himself, using the line “I’m sorry if the communication between us isn’t working, I’m from Mars”.’ Bowie ran his fingers through his hair. ‘You know, my whole life I gleefully absorbed anything that ignited the world, anything that electrified it; I collected fashions and sensitivities like other people collect art or postage stamps. Call it eclecticism, but it may have been my greatest talent. I was never really an innovator, more of a champion of the present, an architect who brought that feeling of being alive and trends together in such a way that it looked like something new. Looking back, I’d say it was my way of communicating: Hey, people, I understand what moves you, look at me and listen up, I’ve made a song out of it! Or something along those lines. But for a long time I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I simply didn’t know how to do it, how a simple conversation worked. I was afraid of getting into relationships, incapable of listening to others. For someone like that, the stage, or let’s say the world of the arts, is the perfect platform, it’s ideally suited to giving monologues. You reach everyone, but no one reaches you. You’re the messiah! A puppet of course, an idol, but for that very reason you can’t let anyone get close, because then it might get out that you’re actually just shy and insecure. And so, with time, you really do become an alien. You don’t need to put a costume on to be one, but of course it helps. If you feel as uneasy around people as I did back then, then you just make outer space out to be your home, look for answers from a higher being, or act as though you’re one yourself.’

Julian tapped his bottle, let it drift away from him for a moment then grasped it again.

‘You sound so terribly grown up,’ he said.

‘I am terribly grown up,’ laughed Bowie, bursting with happiness. ‘And it’s wonderful! Believe me, this whole spiritual paperchase to find out the connection between humanity and the universe, why we were born and where we go when we die, what gives us and our actions meaning, if there even is a meaning – I mean, I love science fiction, Julian, and I love what you’ve created! But all this space stuff was always just a metaphor for me. It was only ever about the spiritual search. The Churches’ maps were always a little too vaguely drawn for me, full of one-way streets and dead ends. I didn’t want anyone else to dictate how and where I was supposed to look. You can ritualise God, or you can interpret him. The latter doesn’t go down pre-set paths; it demands that you slip away from them. I did that, and I kept on creating new spacesuits for myself in order to explore this empty, endless cosmos, hoping to meet myself, as Starman, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Major Tom. And then, one day, you marry a wonderful woman and move to New York, and suddenly you realise: Out there, there’s nothing, but on the Earth there’s everything. You meet people, you talk, communicate, and what seemed difficult before now just happens, with wonderful ease. Your inflated fears shrink to become bog-standard worries; the early flirt with death, the pathos of ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’ reveals itself to be nothing more than the spectacularly unoriginal mood of a clueless and inexperienced young boy; you no longer wake up with the fear of going crazy; you no longer think obsessively about the misery of human existence, but about your children’s future. And you ask yourself what the devil you were looking for in space! Do you see? I’ve landed. I’ve never enjoyed living on Earth so much, amongst other people. And if my health allows I can enjoy it for a few more years. It’s bad enough that it will only be another ten or twelve, and not three hundred, so I’m looking forward to every moment. So, give me one good reason why I should fly to the Moon now, now that I’ve finally found my home and settled in down there.’

Julian thought it over. He could think of a thousand reasons why he wanted to fly to the Moon, but suddenly not a single one that would have any relevance for the old man opposite him. And yet Bowie looked anything but old, more as though he had just been reborn. His eyes looked as thirsty for knowledge as ever. It wasn’t the look of an extraterrestrial observer, though, but that of an earth-dweller.

That’s the difference between us, he thought. I was always extremely earthly. Always on the frontier, the great communicator, untouched by fear or self-doubt. And then he wondered what it would be like if one day he reached the conclusion that this space opera, of which he was the director and protagonist, had only served to bring him closer to Earth, and whether he would like this realisation or not.

Or was he just an egocentric alien after all, one who didn’t even get what was going on with his own children. How had Tim put it?

You don’t have a clue what’s going on around you!

Julian pulled a face. Then he laughed too, but without any real pleasure, raised his glass and toasted Bowie.

‘Cheers, old friend,’ he said.

A little later, Amber opened her eyes and saw that the Earth had disappeared. Fear shot through her. She had slept straight through the previous night and it had still been there in the morning, half of it in any case. But now she couldn’t see even the slightest glimpse of it.

Of course she couldn’t. Night had fallen over the Pacific half and the lights of civilisation weren’t visible from the height of geostationary orbit. There was no cause for alarm.

She turned her head. Next to her, Tim was staring into the darkness.

‘What’s wrong, my hero?’ she whispered. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No, I just woke up, that’s all.’ She crawled nearer to him and rested her head on his shoulder.

‘You were wonderful,’ he said softly.

‘No, you were wonderful. Is there something on your mind?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps Julian was right after all. Maybe I’m just seeing ghosts.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s good that you’re keeping an eye on things. It’s just that, if you continue to treat him like an enemy, he’ll act like one.’

‘I’m not treating him like an enemy.’

‘Well, you’re not exactly the world champion when it comes to diplomacy.’

‘No.’ He laughed softly. ‘I don’t know, Amber. For some reason I’ve just got a bad feeling.’

‘That’s just the zero gravity,’ she murmured, almost asleep again already. ‘What could go wrong?’

Tim was silent. She blinked, lifted her head and realised she’d been mistaken. You could still see a narrow blue-white crescent on the right-hand side. Everything was fine. The Earth was still in its place.

Go to sleep, my darling, she wanted to say, but the tiredness overcame her with such force that she could only think it. Before she dozed off, she was overcome by the image of a black cloth spreading out over the two of them. Then, nothing.

Carl Hanna couldn’t sleep, but then again he didn’t need to. He ran his possessions through his fingers one after another, looking at them searchingly, rotating them, turning them over then packing them carefully away again: the small flacon of aftershave, the bottle filled with shower gel and the one with shampoo, tubes of skin cream, shaving foam, various packages of medication for headaches, sickness, stomach upsets, cotton buds and soft, pliable earplugs, toothbrush and toothpaste. He had even packed dental floss, nail scissors and a file, a hand mirror, his electric hair trimmer and three golf balls. There was a course in the grounds of the Gaia, Lynn had told him, Shepard’s Green. Hanna played golf reasonably well, and he also placed a lot of importance on looking well groomed. Apart from that, none of all this junk was what it seemed to be. Just as the guitar wasn’t really a guitar, Carl Hanna wasn’t the person he pretended to be. It wasn’t his real name, nor was his life story anything but complete fabrication.

He thought about Vic Thorn.

They had taken everything into account, everything except the possibility that Thorn might have an accident. The preparation for his mission had been exemplary, everything planned well in advance. Nothing should have gone wrong, but then a tiny speck of space debris had changed everything in a matter of seconds.

Hanna looked out into space.

Thorn was somewhere out there. He had joined the inventory of the cosmos, an asteroid on an unknown path. Many people believed that he must have stayed in the Earth’s gravitational field, which would have meant encountering his body cyclically in orbit. But Thorn had still not been found. It was possible that he would crash into the Sun one day in the far future. Plausible that some day in a few million years’ time he would turn up in the sphere of a planet inhabited by non-human intelligence and cause a great deal of surprise there.

He held up a roll-on deodorant, pulled off the cap, then put it back on and tucked it away.

This time, it would work.