Limit

Arrival

As if there hadn’t been dozens of pairs of boots marking the surface of the Moon with the imprint of mankind’s heroism since 2018, Eugene Cernan – the commander of Apollo 17 – was still regarded as the last man to have walked on its surface. The years between ’69 and ’72 were monumental in the landscape of American history: a short but magical epoch of manned missions which were strangely counteracted by Nixon bringing the space programme back down to earth with a bump. As a result, Cernan became the last one up there to turn off the light. He was, and remained, the last of his century. The eleventh Apollo astronaut on the Moon, he walked around the Mare Serenitatis and made hundreds of those small steps that Neil Armstrong had declared to be such a giant leap for mankind. His team collected the biggest sample of lunar rocks and completed more moon surface trips than any other before them. The commander himself even managed to cause the first ever automobile accident on a celestial body, smashing up the rear left wing of his Lunar Rover, before – with a talent for improvisation reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe – patching it back together again. Yet none of this was enough to re-enliven the public’s interest. It was the end of an era. Cernan, presented with the opportunity to immortalise himself in encyclopaedias and textbooks with a thunderous obituary, instead offered words of remarkable helplessness:

‘We spent most of the trip home,’ he said, ‘debating the colour of the Moon.’

Incredible. So that was the grand summary of six expensive landings on a rock hundreds of thousands of kilometres away from Earth? That no one even knew what colour it was?

‘It looks kind of yellow to me,’ said Rebecca Hsu, after gazing silently out of the small porthole for a long while. Hardly any of them were venturing over to the row of windows any more. From there, throughout the two days since their launch, they had watched their home planet get smaller and smaller, a ghostly dwindling of familiarity. It was as if they were dividing their loyalty equally at the midway point between the Earth and Moon before fully succumbing to the fascination of the satellite. From 10,000 kilometres away it could still be seen in its entirety, starkly silhouetted against the blackness of outer space around it. And yet this object of romantic contemplation had billowed to become a sphere with menacing presence, a battlefield, scarred by billions of years of celestial bombardment. In complete silence, unbroken by the soundtrack of civilisation, they raced towards this strange, alien world. Only the tinnitus-like hiss of the life-support systems indicated that there was any technological activity on board at all. Beyond that, the silence made their heartbeats thunder like bush drums and the blood swirl in their veins. It roused lively chatter within the body about the state of its chemical processes and pushed their imaginations to the very limit.

Olympiada Rogacheva paddled up, in awe of her weightlessness. They had advanced another thousand kilometres towards the satellite, and could now see only three-quarters of it.

‘It doesn’t look yellow,’ she murmured. ‘To me it seems more mouse-grey.’

‘Metallic grey,’ Rogachev corrected her coldly.

‘I’m not so sure,’ Evelyn Chambers looked over from the next window. ‘Metallic? Really?’

‘Yes, really. Look. Up there to the right, the big, round patch. Dark, like molten iron.’

‘You’ve been in the steel industry for too long, Oleg. You could find something metallic in a chocolate pudding.’

‘Of course he could – the spoon! Woohoo!’ Miranda Winter did a somersault, cheering gleefully. Most of the others had tired of doing zero-gravity acrobatics. But Miranda couldn’t get enough of them and was rapidly getting on the others’ nerves. She was incapable of holding a conversation without rolling through the air, squealing and cackling, thumping people in the ribs or whacking them on the chin as she did. Evelyn, on the receiving end of a kick in the small of her back, snapped: ‘You’re not a merry-go-round, Miranda. Give it a rest, will you!’

‘But I feel like one!’

‘Then close yourself down for repairs or something. It’s too cramped in here for all that.’

‘Hey, Miranda.’ O’Keefe looked up from reading his book: ‘Why don’t you try imagining you’re a blue whale instead?’

‘What? Why?’

‘Blue whales wouldn’t act like that. They’re content to just hang around, more or less motionless, and eat plankton.’

‘They blow water too,’ Heidrun commented. ‘Do you want to see Miranda blow water?’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘You’re all being silly,’ Miranda concluded. ‘By the way, I think it’s kind of blue. The moon, I mean. It’s almost eerie.’

‘Uhhh,’ O’Keefe shuddered.

‘So what colour is it?’ Olympiada wanted to know.

‘It’s every colour, and yet none.’ Julian Orley came through the connecting hatch that separated the living quarters of the Charon from the landing module. ‘No one knows.’

‘How come?’ Rogachev wrinkled his forehead. ‘I mean, surely we’ve had enough time to figure that out?’

‘Of course. The problem is that no one has seen it through anything other than toned or filtered windows and visors yet. And on top of that, the Moon doesn’t have a particularly high albedo—’

‘A what?’ asked Miranda, rotating like a pig on a spit.

‘Reflectivity. The fraction of solar energy which is reflected back to space. The reflection rate of lunar rock is not especially high, particularly not in the maria—’

‘I’m not following a word you say.’

‘The dry plains on the surface of the Moon,’ explained Julian patiently. ‘Collectively, they’re called maria. The plural of mare. They appear to be even darker than the mountain rings in the craters.’

‘So why does the Moon look white when we look at it from Earth?’

‘Because it has no atmosphere. Sunlight hits its surface unfiltered, in just the same way it would an astronaut’s unprotected retina. The UV rays outside are far more dangerous to our eyes than they would be on Earth, that’s why the spaceship’s windows are tinted.’

‘But loads of lunar samples have been brought back to Earth,’ said Rogachev. ‘What colour are they?’

‘Dark grey. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole moon is dark grey. Perhaps some parts of it are brown, or even yellow.’

‘Exactly,’ said O’Keefe from behind his book.

‘Everyone sees it slightly differently. Everyone has their own moon, one might say.’ Julian went over to join Evelyn. They were passing over a lone gigantic crater which lay far below them. Molten light seemed to stream from its slopes down to the surface surrounding it. ‘That’s Copernicus by the way. According to popular opinion it’s the most spectacular of all the lunar craters and over eight hundred million years old. It’s a good ninety kilometres wide, with slopes that would present a challenge to any mountaineer, but the most impressive thing about it is how deep it is. Do you see that massive shadow inside it? It’s almost four kilometres down to the very bottom.’

‘There are mountains right in the middle of it,’ observed Evelyn.

‘How is that possible?’ wondered Olympiada. ‘I mean, in the middle of the point of impact? Shouldn’t it all be flat?’

Julian fell silent for a while.

‘Imagine it like this,’ he said. ‘Picture the surface of the Moon, just as you see it now, but without Copernicus. Okay? Everything is still and peaceful. So far! Then, a boulder eleven kilometres in diameter rushes up from the depths of outer space at a speed of seventy kilometres per second, two hundred times the speed of sound. There’s no atmosphere, nothing at all that could slow it down. Imagine what kind of impact it would make crashing into the surface. That alone would happen in just a few thousandths of a second. The meteor would penetrate the surface by about a hundred metres – not particularly deep you might say, and an eleven-kilometre crater like that wouldn’t be such a big deal. But there’s a little more to it than that. The complex thing about meteorites is that they transform all their kinetic energy into heat at the moment of impact. In other words, they explode! It’s this explosion that can create a hole ten to twenty times bigger than the meteorite itself. Millions of tonnes of rock are blasted in all directions and, in a flash, a wall forms around the crater. The whole thing happens at such speed, the displaced layers of lunar basalt can’t be restructured as quickly, so the surface gives in to the shock pressure and is compressed many kilometres deep. Meanwhile, huge clouds of debris are collecting overhead. The meteorite, of course, is now fully transformed into heat and no longer exists in its previous form, so the ground rebounds, shooting upwards to form a massive peak in the centre of the crater. The rock clouds continue to spread rapidly and once again the absence of any atmosphere to contain the radius of the cloud makes itself felt. Instead the debris is flung further and further out before descending, hundreds of kilometres away, like billions of missiles. You can still see this ring of fall-out today, known as an ejecta blanket, especially when there’s a full moon. It has a different albedo to the darker volcanic rock around it, and seems to glow from within. In actual fact it’s just reflecting a little more sunlight. So, that’s how you should picture Copernicus coming about. Victor Hugo, by the way, claimed to see an eye within it that looked back at whoever was looking at the Moon.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Olympiada dejectedly.

Julian smiled knowingly to himself, relishing the awkward silence that followed his account. All around him cosmic bombs were crashing into their thoughts and converting kinetic energy into questions such as, in the event of a similar impact threatening Earth, whether it would be better to seek refuge in the cellar or to go for one last beer.

‘I guess our atmosphere wouldn’t be of much help?’ Rebecca Hsu suggested.

‘Well…’ Julian pursed his lips. ‘Meteorites are always plummeting down to Earth, around forty tonnes of them a day in fact. Most of them are the size of a grain of sand or pebble and end up burning themselves out. Now and again one the size of a fist will come along, and occasionally something bigger will crash into tundra or the sea. In 1908, for example, a sixty-metre-wide fragment of a comet exploded over Siberia and devastated an area the size of New York.’

‘I remember hearing about that,’ said Rogachev drily. ‘We lost some forest, a few sheep and a shepherd.’

‘You would have lost a lot more if it had hit Moscow. But yes, in the main, the universe is essentially past the worst. Meteorites like the one that caused Copernicus have become few and far between.’

‘How far between exactly?’ drawled Heidrun.

Julian pretended to give it some thought. ‘The last really significant one came down sixty-five million years ago in the area that’s now known as Yucatán. The shock-waves travelled all around the world, causing several years of continuous winter, which led to the loss of considerable amounts of flora and fauna, and unfortunately, almost all the dinosaurs.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘You really want to know when the next one will hit?’

‘Just for my own planning purposes, yes.’

‘Well, according to statistical data there’s a global catastrophe every twenty-six million years. How catastrophic exactly depends on the size of the impactor. An asteroid seventy-five metres in diameter has the explosive force of one hundred Hiroshima bombs. Anything exceeding two kilometres can trigger a global winter and would mean the end of mankind.’

‘So, according to that we’re forty million years overdue,’ established O’Keefe. ‘How big was the dinosaur-killer again?’

‘Ten kilometres.’

‘Thank you, Julian, I’m very glad you’ve brought us up here away from it all.’

‘So what can we do about it?’ asked Rebecca.

‘Very little. The nations with space programmes have avoided dealing with the problem for years, preferring instead to devote their energy to building up an expensive battery of mid-range missiles. But what we really need is a functioning meteorite defence system. When the hammer falls it won’t matter whether you’re a Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Christian, atheist or fundamentalist, or who you’re fighting with, none of that will matter. Crash, and that’s it! We don’t need weapons against each other. What we really need is one that can save us all.’

‘So true.’ Rogachev looked at him, expressionless. Then he glided over, took Julian by the arm and pulled him slightly apart from the others.

‘But haven’t you had that for ages already?’ he added, quietly. ‘Aren’t you in the process of developing weapons against meteorites too?’

‘We’ve created a development team, yes.’ Julian nodded.

‘You’re developing weapons on the OSS?’

‘Defence systems.’

‘How reassuring for all of us.’ The Russian smiled thinly.

‘It’s a research group, Oleg.’

‘Well, I hear the Pentagon are very interested in this research group.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Julian smiled back. ‘I know the rumours. Both Russia and China are constantly accusing us of producing space weapons for the Americans. But it’s all nonsense! The sole purpose of our research is to be able to act if the laws of probability come into their own. I sure as hell want to be able to shoot if something like that’s on a collision course.’

‘Weapons can be used against all kinds of things, Julian. You’ve secured America a position of power in space. You yourself are striving to rule over the energy supply by controlling the technologies. You’re wielding a great deal of power, and you’re trying to tell me you’re not pursuing your own interests?’

‘Look out of the window,’ said Julian calmly. ‘Look at that blue-white jewel.’

‘I see it.’

‘And? Are you homesick?’

Rogachev hesitated. ‘I don’t really use terms like that.’

‘You can choose whether to believe me on this or not, Oleg, but once this trip is behind you, you’ll be a different person. You’ll have realised that our planet is a fragile little Christmas tree bauble, covered by a wafer-thin layer of breathable air, so far at least. No borders or national states, just land, sea and a few billion people who have to share the bauble because it’s the only one they’ve got. Every decision that’s not aimed at keeping our planet together, every aggression for some resource or religious idea will sicken you. Perhaps you’ll stand on the peak of some crater and cry, or maybe you’ll just ask a few sensible questions, but it will change you. There’s no way back once you’ve seen the Earth from space, from the distance of the Moon. There’s nothing you can do but fall in love with it. Do you really think I would allow someone to misuse my technologies?’

Rogachev fell silent for a while.

‘I don’t believe you would want to allow it,’ he said. ‘I’m just asking myself whether you have any choice in the matter.’

‘I do, the more friends I get.’

‘But you’re a world champion in making enemies! I know you have a league of extraordinary gentlemen in mind, a world power of independent investors, but for that you’re intruding massively into national interests. How does it fit together? You want my money, Russian money, but on the other hand you don’t want anything to do with Moscow.’

‘So is it Russian money just because you’re Russian?’

‘Well, I’m sure they’d prefer it there if I invested my fortune in national space travel.’

‘Good luck. Let me know when you’ve managed to get your own space elevator.’

‘You don’t think we can?’

‘You don’t even believe it yourself! I own the patents. But still, I have to admit that I wouldn’t have got this far without America. We’ve both invested astronomical sums in space travel. But Russia is broke. Putin founded his Mafia state on oil and gas, and now no one wants it. You played poker and you lost. Don’t forget, Oleg, that Orley Enterprises is ten times the size of Rogamittel. We’re the biggest technology company in the world, but my investors and I still need each other nonetheless. But no one in Moscow would do you any favours. It may be a patriotic gesture, sponsoring Russia’s ramshackle space travel, but your money would just drain away. You wouldn’t last long enough to catch up with me, because your State would have sucked the very last drop out of you before you even had the chance, and without creating any decent results either.’

This time Rogachev was silent for even longer. Then he smiled again.

‘Moscow would give you more of a free hand than Washington. Are you sure you don’t want to switch sides?’

‘I guessed you’d be obliged to ask me that.’

‘I was asked to test the waters, see how willing you might be.’

‘Firstly, we’re not in the Cold War any more. Secondly, Russia can’t afford my exclusivity. Thirdly, I’m not on anyone’s side. Does that answer your question?’

‘Let’s put it a different way. With the right conditions, would you be willing to sell your technologies to Russia too?’

‘Well, would you be prepared to climb on board with me? I mean, you’re certainly not here because you’re afraid of Moscow.’

Rogachev stroked his chin.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I suggest we sleep on it and enjoy a few days of holiday first.’

The Charon was essentially a tube, seven metres in diameter and twenty-eight metres long, segmented into three parts and connected to a landing module. A flying omnibus, divided up into sleeping quarters and command cockpit, bistro and seating area, whose creator had failed to do it the honour of making it aerodynamic given that it would never be required to pass through an atmosphere. The Apollo capsules and the Orion, originally planned as successor to the space shuttle, hadn’t exactly met the expectations of design-accustomed cinema-goers either, but they had at least been able to offer a chicly rounded little nose, which began to give off a red glow on entering the thermosphere. Compared with this, the Charon had all the charm of a household appliance. A tonne of white and grey, smooth here, corrugated there, partly filled with fuel, partly with astronauts, and adorned with the O of Orley Enterprises.

‘Prepare for braking manoeuvre,’ said Peter’s voice over the loudspeaker.

Two and a half days in a space shuttle, even if it was incredibly spacious and decorated in a colour scheme developed by psychologists, still brought thoughts of detention centres to mind. The enchantment of the unfamiliar lost its lustre when confronted with the proximity and monotony of their surroundings, and came out in debates about the state of the planet, as well as unexpected chumminess and openly expressed dislike. Sushma and Mukesh Nair, aided by their charismatic shyness, rallied like-minded people around them, including Eva Borelius, Karla Kramp, Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker. They engaged in relaxed conversation, that is until Mimi initiated a discussion about Darwinism: wasn’t it just some dead end the natural sciences had ended up in thanks to atheistic arrogance, from which only a creationist world-view could offer the way out? Life, she concluded, was far too complex to have come about by chance in some ancient ocean, and especially not four billion years ago. Karla responded that comments like that questioned the complexity of some of the people present, a riposte which unleashed a series of heated reactions. Aileen Donoghue came to Mimi’s aid, saying that although she didn’t want to tie herself down to the specifics of a few thousand years more or less, she still questioned any relationship between the species. It was much more likely that all living beings had been created by God in one breath. Karla commented that it was perfectly obvious that Mimi was descended from apes. Besides which, the first two chapters in the Book of Moses each dealt with the creation of mankind differently, so even the Old Testament couldn’t offer any unity on the process of creation, in so far as one could base serious scientific knowledge on one single, historically questionable book.

Meanwhile, bonds were formed between Rebecca Hsu, Momoka Omura, Olympiada Rogacheva and Miranda Winter. Evelyn Chambers got on well with everyone, apart from Chuck Donoghue perhaps, who had told Mimi in confidence that he thought Evelyn was godless, a comment which she had immediately passed on to Olympiada and Amber Orley, who, in turn, had told Evelyn. Locatelli, who had now recovered from his space sickness, started showing off again with stories of sailing and motor yachts and how he had won the America’s Cup, of his love of running, solar-powered racing cars and the possibility of extracting enough energy even out of a tick that it could make its contribution to the protection of the environment.

‘Every single body, even the human one, is a machine,’ he said. ‘And machines create warmth. All of you here are nothing more than machines, mere heaters. I tell you, people, if we collected everyone around the world into one great big machine, we wouldn’t need helium-3.’

‘And what about the soul?’ asked Mimi indignantly.

‘Bah, the soul!’ Locatelli threw his arms apart, floated away a little and tapped his finger against his skull. ‘The soul is software, my dear lady. Just thinking flesh. But if there were a soul, I would be the first to build a machine out of it. Hahaha!’

‘Locatelli was telling us the most amazing things,’ said Heidrun to Walo later. ‘Do you know what you are?’

‘What am I, my love?’

‘An oven. Now come here and warm me up.’

Mimi and Karla made their peace with one another, Hanna played guitar – unifying the others at least on a musical level, and winning a fan in Locatelli, who was photographing him constantly – and O’Keefe read screenplays. Each one of them acted as though their noses weren’t filled with the steadily intensifying mélange of sweat, intimate odours, flatulence and hair sebum, against which even the high-tech air synthesiser on board was struggling in vain. Space travel might be fascinating, but one of its disadvantages was definitely not being able to open a window to let some fresh air in. Evelyn wondered how it was supposed to work on long-term missions, with all the smells and increasing tension. Hadn’t a Russian cosmonaut once said that all the prerequisites for committing murder were there if two men were shut into a narrow cabin and left alone together for two months? But perhaps they would take different people on a mission like that. No individualists, certainly not a load of crazy super-rich people and celebrities. Peter Black, their pilot, certainly seemed well-balanced, one might even say quite boring. A team player without any flamboyant or alarmist characteristics.

‘Start braking manoeuvre.’

From a distance of 220 kilometres away they could still see half of the Moon, revealing magnificent detail. It looked so round, on account of its modest proportions, that there seemed good reason to fear they wouldn’t be able to get a grip when landing and would just slide down the side. Nina Hedegaard floated over to help them put on their pressure suits, which also contained bladder bags.

‘For later, when we land,’ she explained with a puzzling smile.

‘And who says we’ll need to go?’ called out Momoka Omura.

‘Physics.’ Nina’s dimples deepened. ‘Your bladder could take the onset of gravity as a reason to empty itself without any advance warning. Do you want to soak your pressure suit?’

Momoka looked down at herself as if she already had.

‘This whole venture seems to be somewhat lacking in the elegance stakes,’ she said, pulling on what she had to wear.

Nina shooed the Moon walkers through the connecting airlock into the landing craft, yet another barrel, this time conically shaped at the top and equipped with four powerful telescopic legs. In comparison with the living module it offered all the movement radius of a sardine-tin. Most of them let the procedure of being strapped in wash over them with the embalmed facial expression of old hands; after all, it was only two and a half days ago that they had sat alongside one another in just the same way, waiting for the shuttle to catapult them from the docking port of the OSS into outer space with an impressive blast of fire. But contrary to all their expectations, the ship had moved away slowly as if it were trying to disappear unnoticed. It was only once they were at a suitable distance from the space city that Peter had ignited the thruster, accelerating to maximum speed then turning off the engines, after which they had raced silently through space towards their pockmarked destination.

The time for relaxing was over, and everyone was happy about it. It was good to finally arrive.

Once again, they were pressed forcefully back into their seats until, at 70 kilometres above the Moon’s surface, Peter braked the spaceship down to a speed of 5600 kilometres per hour, rotated 180 degrees and stabilised in orbit. Below them, craters, rock formations and powdery grey plateaux drifted past. Just as in the space elevator, cameras were transmitting all the images from outside onto holographic monitors. They did a two-hour lap of honour around the satellite, during which Nina Hedegaard explained the sights and particularities of this foreign world to them.

‘As you already know from your preparatory training, a Moon day lasts quite a bit longer than an Earth one,’ she hissed in her Scandinavian-tinged English. ‘Fourteen Earth days, eighteen hours, twenty-two minutes and two seconds to be precise, and the Moon night is just as long. We call the boundary between light and shadow the terminator. It moves at an incredibly slow pace, which means you don’t need to be afraid of suddenly being plunged into darkness during a walk. But when it gets dark, it really does! The terminator is clear-cut: there’s light or shadow, but no dusk. Some of the sights lose their appeal in the dull midday light, so that’s why we’ll visit the most interesting places in the Moon’s morning or evening, when the shadows are long.’

Beneath them they noticed another impressive crater, followed by a bizarrely fissured landscape.

‘The Lunar Appenines,’ explained Nina. ‘The whole area is filled with rimae, groove-like structures. Early astronomers thought they were transport networks made by the Selenites. It’s a wonderful landscape! The broad valley winding upwards over there is Rima Hadley; it leads through the Swamp of Laziness, a funny name, because there’s neither a swamp there, nor is it lazy. But it’s like that all over the Moon, seas which aren’t actually seas and so on. Do you see the two mountains to the side of the rima? That’s Mons Hadley, and beneath it Mons Hadley Delta. Both of them are well known from photographs, you often see them with a Moon Rover in the foreground. The Apollo 15 landed not far from there. The lunar module’s landing gear is still there, along with some other things the astronauts left behind.’

‘What other things?’ asked Nair, his eyes gleaming.

‘Shit,’ muttered Locatelli.

‘Why do you always have to be so negative?’

‘I’m not. They left their shit behind. Everyone knows that, it would have been crazy not to, right? Believe me, wherever there’s landing gear like that there’ll be astronaut shit lying around somewhere.’

Nair nodded. Even that seemed to fascinate him. The spaceship flew swiftly over more rilles, mountains and craters and finally over the shore of the Sea of Tranquillity. Nina pointed out a small crater, named after Moltke and known for its sprawling cave system, created by flowing lava aeons ago.

‘Similar systems have been discovered in the walls and plateaux of the Peary Crater in the northern polar region, where the American moon base was built. We’ll visit Moltke at the start of the Moon evening, when the terminator is in the middle of the crater. It’s a unique sight! And then there’s the museum of course, admittedly a little barren scenically, but an essential visit nonetheless because—’

‘Let me guess,’ called Ögi. ‘Apollo 11.’

‘Correct,’ beamed Nina. ‘It’s essential to know that the Apollo missions were dependent on the narrow equatorial belt. Finding a spectacular landing place wasn’t the issue, it was just about setting foot on the Moon at all. Of course, it’s the symbolic value of the museum that matters most today. By now you’ll be able to find evidence of former visits all over the place, and in far more interesting locations, but Armstrong’s footprints – well, you can only find them there.’

The flight then took them right across the Mare Crisium, the darkest of the Moon seas, in which, as Nina explained, the highest gravity ever measured on the Moon can be found. For a while they saw nothing but wildly fissured landscapes and ever-increasing shadows which spilled ominously into the valleys and plateaux, forming vast pools and filling the craters until only the highest edges still lay in sunlight. Evelyn shuddered at the thought of having to stumble around in the shapeless darkness, then the very last of the brightly lit islands disappeared and enigmatic darkness covered the monitors, seeping into the arteries and convolutions of the brain and swallowing any peace of mind.

‘The Dark Side of the Moon,’ sighed Walo Ögi. ‘Anybody remember that? Pink Floyd? It was a classic album.’

Lynn, who had felt relatively stable during the journey, was now lost in the darkest depths of her soul. Once again, it seemed as if her courage and vitality had been sucked right out of her. On the far side of the Moon, you couldn’t see the Earth, nor, unfortunately, the sun. If there is a hell, she thought, then it wouldn’t be hot and fiery, but cold, a nihilistic blackness. It wouldn’t need the devil or demons, torture slabs, stakes or boiling cauldrons. The absence of the familiar, the inner and outer world, the end of all feeling; that was hell. It was almost like total blindness. It was the death of all hope, fading into fear.

Take a deep breath, feel the body.

She needed to move, she had to get out of here and run, because anyone who ran could make the cold star inside them glimmer again, but she sat there, belted in to her seat as the Charon raced through the darkness. What was Ögi talking about? The Dark Side of the Moon. Who was Pink Floyd? Why was Nina blabbering relentless nonsense? Couldn’t someone make the stupid goose shut up? Twist her neck, tear out her tongue?

‘The far side of the Moon isn’t necessarily dark,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just that the same side of it is always facing the Earth.’

Tim, who was sitting next to her, turned his head.

‘Did you say something?’

‘It’s just that the same side of it is always facing the Earth. You don’t see the far side, but it’s illuminated just as often as the front side.’ Breathless, she stumbled over her words. ‘The far side isn’t dark. Not necessarily. It’s just that the same side of it is—’

‘Are you afraid, Lynn?’

Tim’s concern. Like a rope thrown out for her to catch.

‘Nonsense.’ She drew air into her lungs. ‘I’ve already flown this route three times. There’s no need to be afraid. We’ll be back in the light again soon.’

‘—can assure you that you’re not missing much,’ Nina was saying. ‘The front side is far more interesting. Remarkably, there are practically no maria on the far side, no seas. It’s saturated with craters, rather monotonous, but nonetheless the ideal location for building a space telescope.’

‘Why there?’ asked Hanna.

‘Because the Earth is to the Moon what the Moon is to the Earth, namely a Chinese lantern that intermittently illuminates its surface. Even when it’s midnight on the Moon, the surface area is still partially illuminated by the waning residual light of the Earth. The rear side by contrast is, as you can see, as black at night as the cosmos around it: there’s no sunlight, no light from the Earth to outshine the view of the stars. Astronomers would love to set up an observation post here, but for now they have to content themselves with a telescope on the Moon’s North Pole. It’s a compromise at any rate: the sun is low-lying, and you can look at the starry sky on the far side from there.’

Lynn reached for Tim’s hand and squeezed it. Her thoughts were circling around murder and destruction.

‘I don’t know how you’re doing,’ he said softly, ‘but I’m finding this darkness quite oppressive.’

Oh, clever Tim! Playing the ally.

‘Me too,’ she said gratefully.

‘I guess that’s normal, right?’

‘It won’t be for long.’

‘And when will we be back in the light?’ asked Miranda at the same moment.

‘Just another hour,’ hissed Nina. Jussssst, she said, so affected, so foolish. Julian’s stupid little hobby. But feeling Tim’s hand pressing against hers, Lynn started to relax, and suddenly remembered that she actually liked the Danish woman. So then why did she react so strongly, so aggressively? What’s happening to me? she wondered.

What the hell is happening to me?

Once the surface of the Moon had had nothing to offer for a while, the external cameras began to transmit pictures of the starry sky into the Charon, and O’Keefe felt an unexpected rush of familiarity. Even on the OSS he would have gladly gone back to Earth like a shot. Now he just felt a vague longing. Perhaps because the myriad of lights outside were not unlike the sight of distant, illuminated houses and streets, or because the human being, an aquatic mammal, was by virtue of its own origins a child of the cosmos, built from its elements. The contradictory nature of his emotions confused him, like a child who always wanted to be held by the person who wasn’t holding it at that moment. He tried to suppress the thought, but ended up thinking and thinking for an hour, unceasingly, about what he really wanted and where he belonged.

His gaze wandered over to Heidrun. She was two rows in front of him, listening to Ögi tell her something in hushed tones. O’Keefe wrinkled his nose and stared at the monitor. The picture changed. For a moment he couldn’t figure out what the light blobs were supposed to be, but then he realised he was looking at sun-illuminated peaks which were rising out of the shadows. A sigh of relief went through the Charon. They were flying in the light again, towards the North Pole.

‘We’ll detach the landing module now,’ said Black. ‘The mother ship stays in orbit until we dock back onto it in a week’s time. Nina will help you put your helmets on. It may not feel like it, but we’re still flying at five times the speed of sound, so prepare yourselves for the next braking manoeuvre.’

‘Hey, Momoka,’ whispered O’Keefe.

The Japanese woman turned her head around lethargically. ‘What’s up?’

‘Everything okay there?’

‘Of course.’

O’Keefe grinned. ‘Then don’t wet yourself.’

Locatelli let out a hoarse laugh. Before Momoka had time to come up with a rebuke, Nina appeared and pushed the helmet over her head. Within minutes, they were all sitting there with heads like identical golf balls. They heard a hiss as the connection hatch between the mother ship and landing module closed, then a hollow clunk. The landing module freed itself and moved slowly away. So far, there was no sign of the slamming of the brakes they’d been warned about. The landscape changed once more. The shadows became longer again, an indication that they were approaching the polar region. Lava plateaux gave way to craters and mountain ridges. O’Keefe thought he glimpsed a dust cloud in the far distance just over the site, and then the pressure kicked in, the now almost familiar abuse of the thorax and lungs, except that this time the engines were roaring considerably louder than they had been two hours ago. Worried, he wondered whether they might be in difficulties, until he realised that until now it had always been the thrusters far back in the living quarters which were ignited. For the first time, the landing module was manoeuvring by using the engine directly beneath them.

Black’s lighting a fire right under our arses, he thought.

With infernal counter-thrust, the landing module reduced its speed again as it rushed quickly, much too quickly, towards the surface of the Moon. A display on the screen counted down the distance kilometre by kilometre. What was happening? If they didn’t slow down soon they’d be making their own crater. He thought about Julian’s portrayal of the transformation of kinetic energy into heat, felt his ribcage getting tighter, tried to concentrate on the screen. Were his eyeballs shaking? What had they told them in their training? That you weren’t cut out to be an astronaut if you couldn’t control your eyes, because any shaking in the pupils caused blurriness and double vision. They had to be calmly fixed on the instruments. The correct instruments, that’s what really mattered! How could you press the right buttons if you were seeing double?

Were Black’s eyeballs shaking?

The next moment he felt ashamed, full of scorn at himself. He was such an idiot! The centrifuge at the practice site, the launch of the space elevator, braking in the Moon’s orbit; each one had put a lot of pressure on him. Compared with all that, this landing was a walk in the park. He should have been calm personified, but the nerves were reaching out towards him with their electricity-laden fingers, and he had to admit to himself that his inability to breathe properly wasn’t down to the pressure, but the sheer fear of smashing into the Moon.

Four kilometres, five.

The second display revealed that they were steadily slowing down, and he breathed out a sigh of relief. All the worry had been in vain. Three kilometres until touchdown. A mountain ridge came into view, a high plateau, lights which segmented a landing field surrounded by protective barriers. Pipes and domes nestled amongst the rock like armoured woodlice, lying in wait for unsuspecting quarry. Solar fields, masts and antennae shimmered in the light of the low-lying sun; a barrel-shaped structure crowned a nearby hilltop. Further in the distance, open, hangar-like structures could be seen; huge machines crawled through a kind of open-cast mine. A rail system connected the habitats to the spaceport, led into a platform, then branched away from it in a wide curve. O’Keefe saw flights of stairs, hydraulic ramps and manipulator arms which were pointed towards a loading bay, then something white with tall, wide wheels drove along the road and stopped on a bridge; possibly manned, possibly a robot. The Charon shook and sank towards the ground. For a moment it was possible to make out a skyline of massive towers with large, bulky flying machines in between them, tanks and containers, unidentified objects. Something that looked like a praying mantis on wheels rolled off across the airfield, the sheer extent of which was now clear: the size of three or four football pitches. The surrounding land and buildings disappeared behind its dam-like borders, then their spaceship touched down carefully with feather-like elegance, teetered imperceptibly, and came to a standstill.

Something tugged softly at O’Keefe. At first he couldn’t place it, but then the realisation amazed him all the more because of the simplicity of the explanation. Gravity! For the first time since they had set off from the Isla de las Estrellas, excluding acceleration and braking manoeuvres, he was no longer weightless. He had a bodyweight again, and even if it was only a sixth of his weight on Earth, it was still wonderful to weigh something again, a relief after all the days of just drifting around! Hasta la vista, Miranda, he thought, that’s an end to the acrobatics. No more somersaults, no more elbow attacks. A gust of noise ebbed away in his ear canals, a synaptic afterglow; the engines had been turned off long before, but he just couldn’t believe it.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Black, a little dramatically, ‘congratulations! You’ve done it. Nina and I will now help you put on your life-support systems, show you how to regulate the oxygen, cooling and pressure and activate your walkie-talkie systems. After that we’ll go through a series of leak tests – you should already be familiar with those from the external expedition on the OSS, and if not, there’s no cause for concern. We’ll supervise everything. As soon as the checks are done, I’ll pump the air out of the cabin, and we’ll explain the process of disembarcation. Please don’t think I’m being rude if I climb out first, it’s only to further the preservation of your heroism, because I’ll film you as you leave the Charon and we’ll also record your comments for posterity. Does that all make sense? Welcome to the Moon!’

On the Moon.

They were on the Moon.

They had really landed on the goddamn Moon, and the satellite’s one-sixth gravity pulled O’Keefe down to it with the tenderness of a lover, his limbs, his head, his inner organs and bodily fluids, oh yes, the fluids, pulled and pulled and pulled something out of him, and it was out before he could clench his butt cheeks. Warm and happy, it flowed into the bag put there for exactly that purpose, a fountain of joy, a high-five to gravity, a gift to the grey, crater-covered guy whose surface they were to inhabit for the next week. He threw a stolen glance at Momoka Omura, as if there were the possibility that she would turn round to him, look him in the eyes and see it, know it.

Then he shrugged, thinking of the others who had probably pissed themselves beyond the Earth’s orbit. There was worse company to be in.

Peary Base, North Pole, The Moon

Leaving behind footprints was a pioneer’s privilege, and one which made life a little easier for those of the custodian type, who were aware of the risks, but without being exposed to them. They were familiar with natural phenomenona, the appetite and armoury of the local fauna and flora, knew how to adapt themselves to the defiance of the native inhabitants. Their knowledge was all thanks to the feverish, potentially suicidal curiosity of the discoverer type, who neither could nor wanted to do anything other than spend his life walking the narrow line between victory and death. Even in the days of Homo erectus, and the anthroposophists were sure of this, humanity had displayed a tendency to split up into a governing majority alongside a small group which just couldn’t stay put. The latter had a special gene, known as the Columbus Gene, Novelty-seeking Gene or just D4DR in the extended version, code for an extraordinary willingness to cross borders and take risks. Naturally, all of these adventurous types were less suited for the cultivation of the conquered regions. They preferred discovering new areas, getting themselves bitten by new species of animals and fulfilling all the prerequisites so that the more conservative types could make advances. They were the eternal scouts, for whom a footprint on terra incognita meant everything. In turn, it was part of the nature of the custodian to subject lime, mud, sand, gravel, silt and whatever other kind of amorphous unspoiled state there was to the dictatorship of smoothed-out surfaces, which meant that when Evelyn Chambers, awestruck, walked down the gangway of the Charon and stepped on to the surface of the Moon for the first time, she left no lasting impression behind her, instead finding herself back on solid concrete.

For a second she was disappointed. The others, too, were looking at their feet as if walking on the Moon were inextricably linked with hallmarking the regolith.

‘You’ll leave your stamp behind soon enough,’ said Julian’s voice, switched on in all their helmets.

Some of them laughed. The moment of unmet expectations passed, giving way to amazement and disbelief. Evelyn took a hesitant step, then another, bounced – and was carried over a metre in the air by the force of her thigh muscles.

Unbelievable! Absolutely unbelievable!

After over five days of zero gravity she felt the familiar burden of her weight, and yet she didn’t. It was more as though some ominous comic-book radiation had given her superpowers. All around her, the others were leaping wildly around. Black danced attendance amongst them with his camera.

‘Where’s the star-spangled banner?’ boomed Donoghue. ‘I want to ram it into the ground!’

‘Then you’re fifty-six years too late,’ laughed Ögi. ‘The Swiss flag on the other hand—’

‘Imperialists,’ sighed Heidrun.

‘No chance,’ said Julian. ‘Unless you’re planning to blast your flags into the ground.’

‘Hey, look at that,’ called Rebecca Hsu.

Her ample figure shot past the others’ heads, her arms windmilling. If it was Rebecca, that is. It wasn’t that easy to tell. You couldn’t really make out anyone’s face through the mirrored visors; only the printed name on the chest section of the suit betrayed the identity of its wearer.

‘Come on then,’ laughed Julian. ‘Don’t be scared!’

Evelyn took a run-up and did a series of clumsy jumps, then sped upwards again and turned on her own axis, drunk on high spirits. Then she lost her balance and sank back down to the ground in a meditative pose. She couldn’t help breaking out into silly giggles as she landed softly on her behind. Overcome with delight, she stayed where she was, enjoying the surreal scene that was playing out before her. Within seconds the group of well-established movers and shakers had transformed into a horde of first-graders, playmates going wild. She came back to a standing position without any effort whatsoever.

‘Good,’ praised Julian, ‘very good. The Bolshoi Ballet look like a load of blundering fools compared with you, but I’m afraid we need to interrupt the physical exercise temporarily. You’re off to the hotel now, so please turn your attention back to Nina and Peter again.’

It was as though he’d broadcast on the wrong frequency. With the defiance of children who had just been called to the dinner table, they finally trickled over in dribs and drabs to gather around their guides. The image of a bunch of ruffians gave way to one of a secret brotherhood as they stood there, searching for the Holy Grail against the panorama of flying castles. Evelyn let her gaze wander. The base could hardly be seen. Only the station platform loomed imposingly over the landing field, erected on fifteen-metre-high pylons, as Nina explained. Metal staircases and an open elevator led up to the rail tracks, spherical tanks were piled up all around. Two manipulators squatted at the edge of the platform like Jurassic birds, turned to face lobster-like machines with multiple-jointed claws and large loading surfaces. Evelyn guessed their task was probably to receive cargo from the manipulators or to reach it up to them, according to whether goods were being delivered or placed on the rails.

She tried to regulate her breathing. The confinement of the landing module just then had become unbearable for her. She had dreamed feverishly the night before. Higher powers had opened up the Charon using a gigantic tin-opener and exposed its inhabitants to the vacuum, which had turned out to be just a bunch of humanlike creatures gaping in at them, and she had been stark naked. Admittedly it was all a bit silly, but still! The iridescent blue-green imprints of Miranda Winter’s heels had been immortalised in her hips, and she’d had enough. She was even more amazed at how big the landing module actually was when she saw it in the expanse of the airfield. An imposing tower on powerful telescopic legs, practically a small skyscraper. More spaceships were distributed across the field, some with open hatches and yawningly empty insides, clearly intended for receiving freight goods. Several smaller machines spread their spider legs and stared straight ahead with their glassy eyes. Chambers couldn’t help but think of insect spray.

‘You’ll have to forgive the inhabitants of the base for not coming out to greet you,’ said Black. ‘You only go outside if it’s absolutely necessary here. Unlike you, these people spend six months on the Moon. A week’s worth of cosmic radiation won’t harm you so long as you don’t go out in a solar storm without protection. But long-term stays are a different story. So as we won’t be looking around the base until the day of our departure, there’s no reception committee today.’

One of the lobster-like robots started up as if by magic, steered over to the Charon and took some large white containers from its cargo hold.

‘Your luggage,’ Nina explained, ‘will be exposed to the vacuum for the first time up here, but don’t worry, the containers are pressurised. Otherwise your night cream might turn into a monster and attack your T-shirts. Follow me.’

It was like going underwater, but without the ambient pressure. Excitedly, Evelyn realised that she didn’t weigh 66 kilos any more, but just 11, which meant her normal bodily strength would be multiplied by six. As light as a three-year-old, as strong as Superwoman, and carried along by a surge of childlike happiness, she followed Black to the elevator, hopped into the spacious cage and watched the habitats of the base come back into view as they travelled out over the top of the barriers and onto the station platform. Several more rail tracks ran up here. A lit, empty train lay waiting for them, not unlike one of the magnet trains on Earth, but a little less streamlined in shape, which made it look curiously old-fashioned. But why would it have needed to be aerodynamic? There was no wind up here. There wasn’t even any air.

She looked into the distance.

A barrage of images confronted her. A great deal of the surrounding area could be seen from up here. A highland. Hills and ridges, the silhouette of long shadows. Craters, like bowls filled with black ink. A glowing white, low-lying sun dissolved the contours of the horizon, the landscape stood out like stage scenery against the backdrop of outer space. There was no mist or atmosphere to diffuse the light; regardless of its actual distance everything was sharply contoured, as though it were close enough to touch. At the other side of the landing field, the track for the magnet train led into a valley filled with blackness, held its own against the darkness for a while thanks to the height of its columns, and then, without warning, was swallowed by it.

‘We’re just fifteen kilometres away from the Moon’s geographical North Pole here,’ said Black. ‘It’s on a plateau at the north-western edge of the Peary Crater, where it borders on its neighbour, Hermite. The area is nicknamed “Mountains of Eternal Light”. Can anyone guess why?’

‘Just explain, Peter,’ said Julian gently.

‘Well, at the beginning of the nineties interest in the Pole really grew after it was established that the edges and peaks of some of the craters were in constant sunlight. The main problem with having a manned moon base had always been energy supply, and they wanted to avoid working with nuclear reactors. There was a great deal of resistance to it, even on Earth, because of the fear that a spaceship with a reactor like that on board could crash and fall onto inhabited areas. Back when the station was in the planning stages, helium-3 was still just a vague option, so they backed solar energy as usual. The only thing is, while solar panels are great, unfortunately they’re useless at night. A gap of a few hours can be bridged with batteries, but a Moon night lasts fourteen days, and that’s how the Pole came into the running. Admittedly the light yield is somewhat less here than at the equator, because the rays of light fall very obliquely, but on the other hand they’re constant. If you look over at the hills you’ll see entire fields of collectors which are continually aligning their position to face the sun.’

Black paused and let them scan the hills for the collectors.

‘And yet even the Poles aren’t the ideal position for a base. The rays of sunlight fall obliquely, as I already mentioned, it’s quite far away from where the action is up here, and it would have been better to have the lunar telescope on the far side. Some critics also point out that by the time the building work began, the use of helium-3 had become a viable option, so ideally the plans should have been thrown out and the base built in the preferred location, where it could be supplied with energy around the clock by a fusion reactor. It’s actually a bit of a paradox that helium-3 wasn’t used on the Moon of all places, but they followed the original plans regardless. The Poles also have another advantage: the temperature. By Moon standards it’s quite moderate here, a constant forty to sixty degrees in the sun; while on the equator it’s well over one hundred degrees in the midday heat but at night the thermometer plummets to minus one hundred and eighty degrees. No building material can handle fluctuations like that on a long-term basis: it would have to expand and contract like crazy, which means it becomes brittle and leaks. And there’s one more consideration in favour of the Poles. When the sun creeps in as low over the horizon as it does there, wouldn’t that mean there are also areas which are never illuminated by it? If that’s the case, then there’s the chance of finding something there that couldn’t actually exist on the Moon: water.’

‘Why can’t it exist here?’ asked Miranda. ‘Not even a river or a small lake?’

‘Because it would immediately evaporate in the sun and escape into open space. The Moon’s gravity isn’t enough to hold volatile gases; that’s one of the reasons why the Moon has no atmosphere. The only possibility was of frozen water existing in eternal darkness, locked in a molecular bond in moon dust brought here by meteorites. The existence of permanently shadowed chasms like these was quickly proved, for example the impact craters at the base of the Peary Crater, right around the corner from here. And measurements really seemed to confirm the presence of water, which would have enormously favoured the development of a complex infrastructure. The alternative was sending water up here from Earth, which was sheer madness even just from a financial perspective.’

‘And have they found water?’ asked Rogachev.

‘Not so far. A great number of hydrogen deposits of course, but no water. The base was built here regardless because transporting water from Earth turned out to be a lot less complicated and expensive than expected thanks to the space elevator. Now it makes its way to the OSS in tanks, and from that point on mass doesn’t matter anyway. But of course people are still searching feverishly for signs of H₂O, and besides’ – Black pointed over to the barrel-shaped objects in the distance – ‘they’ve started building a small helium-3 reactor anyway, as a reserve for the base’s steadily increasing energy needs.’

‘So, if I’m honest,’ grumbled Momoka Omura, ‘I was expecting the moon base to be a little more impressive.’

‘I think it’s very impressive,’ said Hanna.

‘Me too,’ called Miranda.

‘Absolutely,’ Nair added, laughing. ‘I still can’t believe that I’m on the Moon, that people live here! It’s incredible.’

‘Wait until you see the Gaia,’ said Lynn mysteriously. ‘You probably won’t ever want to leave again.’

‘If it looks like the pile of junk down there then I’ll want to leave immediately,’ snorted Momoka.

‘Baby,’ said Locatelli, more sharply than usual, ‘you’re insulting our hosts.’

‘How? I only—’

‘There are moments when even you should keep your mouth shut, don’t you think?’

‘I beg your pardon? Shut your own!’

‘You’ll like the hotel, Momoka,’ Lynn interrupted hurriedly. ‘Love it, even! And no, it does not look like the moon base.’

Evelyn grinned. From a business point of view she enjoyed little spats like these, particularly as Locatelli and his Japanese muse usually joined forces when it came to antagonising others. She had planned to ask Locatelli onto one of her next shows anyway, for which she was contemplating using the title ‘War of the World Saviours: How the demise of the oil industry is stirring up power struggles amongst suppliers of alternative energy’. Perhaps one or two private thoughts might punctuate the conversation.

In the best of moods, she followed Black.

Lunar Express

They boarded the train via an airlock and took off their helmets and suits. The air was kept at a constant pleasant temperature and the seats, as Rebecca Hsu said with a heartfelt sigh, were the right size to accommodate even an overweight traveller. The remark was addressed to Amber Orley, whom Evelyn had hardly talked to so far. Amber was friendly towards everyone though, and even Julian’s son turned out to be a sociable sort despite his initial reticence – if you could get past his air of leaden concern when it came to looking after his sister. She was visibly spoiling his mood, and Amber’s, and on top of all this she seemed to be putting a strain on Tim’s relationship with his father. None of this had escaped Evelyn’s attention. She reckoned that Lynn had been faking that attack of space sickness in the Picard. Something wasn’t right about her, and Evelyn was determined to find out what. Mukesh Nair had latched on to Tim and was letting him know how wonderful life was, so she sat down next to Amber.

‘Unless of course you’d rather sit next to your husband—’

‘No, no, that’s fine!’ Amber leaned closer. ‘We’re on the Moon, isn’t that just amazing?’

‘It’s mind-blowing!’ Evelyn agreed.

‘And then there’s the hotel,’ she said, rolling her eyes dramatically.

‘You know it then? So far they’ve made such a huge secret out of it. No pictures, no films—’

‘Now and again being in the family has its advantages. Lynn showed us the plans.’

‘I’m bursting with curiosity! Hey, look, we’re on our way.’

Imperceptibly, the train had started moving. Ethereal music floated through the cabin, light as a breath, languid, as though the orchestra were on drugs.

‘That’s so beautiful,’ said Eva Borelius, sitting behind Evelyn. ‘What is it?’

‘Aram Khachaturian,’ Rogachev answered. ‘Adagio for cello and strings, from the Gayaneh suite.’

‘Bravo, Oleg.’ Julian turned round. ‘Can you also tell us which recording?’

‘I believe it has to be the Leningrad Philharmonic, under Gennady Rozhdestvensky, isn’t it?’

‘My God, that’s connoisseurship.’ Borelius seemed stunned. ‘You really know your stuff.’

‘More than anything else, I know how fond our host is of one particular film,’ said Rogachev in an uncharacteristically cheerful tone. ‘Let’s just say I was well prepared.’

‘I had no idea that you were so interested in classical—’

‘No,’ muttered Olympiada quite audibly, ‘you wouldn’t think so to look at him.’

Here we go, thought Evelyn. This is getting better and better.

Lynn took up position in the aisle between the seats.

‘You may perhaps have noticed,’ she said, speaking into a small microphone, ‘that it’s always down to me to speak when we’re talking about the accommodation and facilities. First of all, everything that you see and do on this voyage is a premiere. You were the first guests in the Stellar Island Hotel, and you’ll be the first to set foot inside the Gaia. Obviously, you’re also the first to enjoy a ride on the Lunar Express, which will take less than two hours to transport us almost thirteen hundred kilometres to the hotel. The station we’ve just set out from actually functions more as a sort of shipping facility. Helium-3 is mined in the Mare Imbrium, to the northwest. The tanks are brought here by rail, then they’re loaded onto spaceships and brought to the OSS. The cargo line runs parallel with our rails for a while and then it turns off to the west a little before we reach our destination, so it’s entirely possible that we’ll meet a freight train on our way.’

Outside the windows they could see the landing field receding, with its blast walls rearing up around it. The maglev accelerated, drew out from the base along a long, curving downhill path and rushed towards the shadowed valley.

‘Our scheduled time of arrival at the hotel is 19.15, and there’s no need for you to bother about your luggage. The robots will take it up to your rooms, and meanwhile we’ll meet in the lobby, get to know the hotel crew, take a look around, and then you’ll have a chance afterwards to freshen up. Dinner will be a little later than usual today, at 20:30. After which I recommend you get some sleep. The journey was fairly strenuous, and you’ll be tired, besides which Neil Armstrong reported having slept exceptionally well on his first night on the Moon. So much for the full moon keeping you awake. Any more questions at the moment?’

‘Just one.’ Donoghue raised a hand. ‘Can we get a drink?’

‘Beer, wine, whisky,’ said Lynn, beaming. ‘All alcohol-free.’

‘I knew it.’

‘It’ll do you good,’ said Aileen happily, and patted his leg.

Donoghue growled something blasphemous, and as if in punishment, darkness swallowed them up. For a while they could still see the top of the crater walls bathed in harsh sunlight, and then these too were lost to view. Nina Hedegaard brought round some snacks. György Ligeti’s Requiem came over the speakers, just the right music for the pitch-black outside, and the downward slope steepened perceptibly while the Lunar Express picked up speed. Black explained that they were in a cleft between Peary and Hermite, then they shot out again into the sunlight, past jagged rock formations and towards a steep-sided hollow. It grew dark again while they passed through a smaller crater. Just a moment ago, Evelyn had been burning to winkle some secrets of family life from Amber, but now all she wanted to do was stare out in wonder at this untouched alien landscape, the archaic brutality of its cliff walls and mountain ridges, the velvet silence that lay over the dust-filled valleys and plains, the complete absence of colour. The cold sunlight fell on the edges of the impact craters, and time itself melted in its glare. Nobody felt like talking any more, and even Chucky stopped short in one of his jokes before the feeble punchline and stared out as though hypnotised. Outside, a blue-white glittering jewel lifted slowly above the horizon, gaining height with every kilometre they travelled south – their home, infinitely far away, and achingly beautiful.

Nina and Black chattered on, informative and enthusiastic. They mentioned the names of further craters, Byrd, Gioja, Main. The peaks dwindled away to hills, the chasms gave way to light-filled plains. After an hour, they reached a long rampart wall, Goldschmidt, its western edge bitten away by the jaws of Anaxagoras, and Nina told them that this was an especially recent impact. A few of them looked upwards, thinking that recent might mean just now, rather than a hundred million years ago, and then coughed or laughed nervously. They crossed Goldschmidt and sped across a desert landscape, this one a darker colour, and Julian stood up and congratulated them on crossing their first lunar sea, the Mare Frigoris.

‘And why do they call a dry old desert like this a sea?’ Miranda asked, saving her more educated fellow passengers the embarrassment of having to ask the same question.

‘Because, earlier, these dark basaltic plains were thought to be seas,’ said Julian. ‘The assumption was that the Moon had to be shaped in much the same way as the Earth was. As a result, people imagined that they could see seas, lakes, bays and swamps. What’s interesting here is how they got their names, for instance why this basin is called the Sea of Cold. There’s the Sea of Tranquillity of course, Mare Tranquillitatis, which has gone down in history thanks to Apollo 11, and by the way that’s why three tiny little craters near the landing site are called Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, credit where it’s due. Then there’s a Sea of Serenity, a Sea of Happiness, a Sea of Clouds and another one of Rain, an Ocean of Storms, the Foaming Sea, the Sea of Waves and so on and so forth.’

‘That sounds like the weather forecast,’ said Hanna.

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head there.’ Julian grinned. ‘It’s all down to a certain Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a seventeenth-century astronomer and contemporary of Galileo. He had the idea of naming every crater and every mountain chain after a great astronomer or mathematician, but then he ran out of astronomers, as luck would have it. Later the Russians and the Americans took over his system. Nowadays you can find writers, psychologists and polar explorers remembered for all time here on the Moon, and there are lunar Alps, Pyrenees and Andes as well. Anyway, as far as Riccioli was concerned, the dark plains had to be seas. Plutarch had already believed this, and Galileo declared that if the Moon was another Earth, then the light patches were obviously continents and the dark parts must be bodies of water. Naturally Riccioli also wanted to give these seas of his names as well – and that’s when he made his big mistake! He reckoned that his observations showed that weather down on the Earth was influenced by the phases of the Moon. For instance, good weather during the waxing moon—’

‘And crappy weather during the waning moon.’

‘That’s it! Since then the seas in the eastern hemisphere on the Moon have had peaceful, harmonious names, while over in the west it never rains but it pours. And a sea up by the North Pole obviously has to be cold, hence Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold. Oh, look at that! I do believe there’s something coming towards us.’

Evelyn craned her neck. At first she saw nothing but the endless plain and the rails curving away into the distance, then it leapt out at her. A tiny point, hurtling closer, that flew towards them over the rails and became something long and low with blazing headlamps. Then the two trains passed at a speed approaching 1500 kilometres per hour, without the least sound or tremor from where they sat.

‘Helium-3,’ said Julian reverentially. ‘The future.’

And he sat down as though there was nothing further to say.

The Lunar Express flew onward. A little later an enormous mountain range showed on the horizon, becoming taller with amazing speed as though the Mare Frigoris really were a sea and the range were rising from its depths. Evelyn remembered hearing from someone that the effect was down to the Moon’s curvature. Black told them that this was the crater Plato, a splendid example with a diameter of more than a hundred kilometres and walls two and a half thousand metres high, another little splinter of information fired into Evelyn’s overloaded cerebral cortex that stuck there. The Lunar Express swooped smoothly into the Mare Imbrium, the neighbouring desert plain. The freight tracks branched off, as announced, and vanished off to the west, while they went around Plato and left it behind. More mountains reared up on the horizon, the Lunar Alps, harsh-lit and shot through with veins of shadow. The rails reared boldly upwards into the mountains, where the pillars that held up the maglev track clasped hold of the steep cliffs like claws. The higher they climbed, the more breathtaking the view: stark peaks two thousand metres tall, overhangs like Cubist sculpture, sharp saw-toothed ridges. One last look down at the dusty carpet of the Mare Imbrium, then the tracks curved away into the sea’s hinterland, between peaks and plateaux and onward to the edge of a lunar Grand Canyon, and then—

Evelyn couldn’t believe her eyes.

A sigh of astonishment shuddered through the train. The barely audible hum of the motor joined in with the bass notes of the Zarathustra theme, pregnant with mystery, while the Lunar Express slowed and then the first fanfares burst out brightly. Strauss might have been thinking of Nietzsche’s new dawn, while Kubrick used it for the transformation of the human race into something newer, higher, but right at this moment Evelyn was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer whose depths she had plumbed enthusiastically in her youth, and she remembered one sentence from his work, the terrifying ending of Arthur Gordon Pym:

She held her breath.

Ten, maybe twelve kilometres away from them, atop a plateau, high above a promontory that jutted out like a terrace beneath it and then fell away into a steep canyon, something sat, gazing up at Earth.

A person.

No, it had the shape of a human form. Not a man’s shape, but a woman’s, perfectly proportioned. Her head, limbs and body gleamed gently in front of the endless sea of stars. No expression on that face, no mouth, eyes or nose, but still there was something soulful, almost yearning in her posture as she sat there with her legs hanging over the edge and her arms out to the side, supporting her, elbows straight, her whole attention focused on that silent, distant planet above her where she would never walk.

She was at least two hundred metres tall.

Dallas, Texas, USA

If Loreena Keowa hadn’t already been the best-known face of Greenwatch, they would have had to invent her.

There was no mistaking her ancestry. She was one hundred per cent Tlingit, a member of the nation that had inhabited the south-east coast of Alaska since time immemorial and whose ancestral homeland included parts of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia. There were about 8000 Tlingit left, with numbers falling. Only a few hundred of the old people still spoke the melodic Na-Dené tongue perfectly, although these days more and more young people like Keowa learned it too, seeing themselves as the standard-bearers of ethnic self-determination in a newly green America.

Keowa came from a Raven clan in Hoonah, the Village on the Cliffs, a Tlingit settlement on Chichagof Island. Now, if she wasn’t spending her time in Vancouver, where Greenwatch was headquartered, she lived forty miles west of Hoonah in Juneau. Her features were unmistakably Indian, but at the same time bore the signs of white ancestry, although to the best of her knowledge no white man had ever married into the clan. Without being good-looking in the classical sense, she had a wild and enticing aura about her that could easily seem romantic. Her long, shining black hair exactly matched what a New York stockbroker might expect Indian hair to look like, whereas her style of dress went dead against all the clichés of the noble savage. As far as she was concerned, you could protect the environment quite as well while dressed in Gucci and Armani. She was clear and factual in her work, and hardly ever launched into polemics. Her reports were known to be well researched, unsparing, but at the same time she managed never to damn a culprit irredeemably. Her enemies called her a walking compromise, the ideal solution for milksop Wall Street eco-activists, while her defenders valued the way she brought people and viewpoints together. Whatever the truth of it, nobody could claim that Green-watch’s success wasn’t largely down to Loreena Keowa. In the past couple of years it had grown from a small internet channel to take front place among America’s ecologically aware TV stations, and had a remarkably good track record when it came to corrections or retractions – no mean feat, given that the race for a scoop on the internet went hand in hand with a worrying lack of research credibility.

It was typical for Greenwatch to feel a crude sort of sympathy for the chief strategist of EMCO, Gerald Palstein, who should really count as their bad guy. But Palstein argued for various green positions, and he’d been the victim of an attack in Calgary when he put an end to something that had always made environmental activists turn purple with rage. At the beginning of the millennium, companies such as ExxonMobil had breathed new life into an area of business that had almost been abandoned, and they had the Bush administration’s full, eco-unfriendly support. This was the exploitation of oil sands, a mixture of sand, water and hydrocarbons with huge reserves in Canada, among other places. The reserves in Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake alone were estimated at 24 billion tonnes, catapulting the country up in the list of oil-rich nations to place two, behind Saudi Arabia. Mind you, it cost three times as much to extract the black gold from the sands as from conventional sources, making it a losing business as long as the price per barrel hovered between twenty and thirty dollars. But in the end, rapidly climbing prices had justified the intensive investment, thanks also to Canada’s proximity to the thirsty primary consumer, the USA, grateful for every oil supplier that wasn’t an Arab nation. The oil companies pounced on the slumbering reserves with dollar signs in their eyes, and within a very short time this led to the complete destruction of the boreal forest in Alberta, the moorland biotopes, the rivers and lakes. Additionally, 80 kilos of green-house gas were released into the atmosphere for every barrel of this synthetic oil extracted, and four barrels of polluted water flowed out to poison the land.

But the price per barrel collapsed, for ever. Open-cast extraction stopped overnight, leaving the companies that had driven the business unable to repair the damaged ecosystems. All that was left were ravaged tracts of land, increased incidence of cancer in the population – and companies such as Imperial Oil, a traditional business headquartered in Calgary, which for almost 150 years had made its money from extracting and refining oil and natural gas, and, in the end, increasingly from oil sands. Just as it was at the forefront of the industry, the lights went out, and Palstein, strategic director of the majority shareholder EMCO, which owned about two-thirds of Imperial Oil, had to go to Alberta to tell the management and a stunned workforce that they were being let go.

Perhaps because it was more effective to vent anger on one man than on the ohso-distant Moon, whose resources had led to the disaster, somebody shot at Palstein in Calgary. The deed of a desperate man, at least so most people saw it.

Loreena Keowa thought that there were good grounds for scepticism.

Not that she had an answer either. But how long could an embittered, unemployed shooter expect to escape justice? The attempted killing had been one month ago. A great many things about the theory of an enraged lone gunman didn’t make sense, and since Keowa was working anyway on a feature about the environmental destruction wreaked by the oil companies, Trash of the Titans, it made sense to her that she should look into the case in her own way. Even before helium-3, Palstein had been vocal about the need for his industry to switch direction. He was on record as being no friend of the oil-sands project, and she felt that he had been unfairly treated at the press conference in Anchorage. So she had offered him a TV portrait that would show him in a better light. In exchange, she hoped for some inside information about EMCO, the crumbling giant, and more even than that, she was excited at the thought of being able to help clear up the shooting, in the best tradition of American investigative journalism.

Maybe even solving the case.

Palstein had hesitated a while, and in the end invited her to visit him in Texas, in his house on the shore of Lake Lavon. He was convalescing from his injury here, and recovering from being the bearer of bad news. He made one condition: that for the first conversation, she should turn up without her camera team.

‘We’ll need pictures though,’ Keowa had said. ‘We’re a TV channel.’

‘You’ll get some. As long as I feel that I can trust you. But I can only take so many knocks, Loreena. We’ll sound one another out for an hour, and then you can fetch your crew. Or maybe not.’

Now, in the taxi bringing them downtown from the airport, Keowa went through her material one more time. Her camera crew and sound technician were lolling on the back seat, wrung out by the humid heat that lay across Texas far too early this year. EMCO was headquartered next door in Irving, but Palstein lived on the other side of town. They had a light lunch in the Dallas Sheraton, then Palstein’s driver arrived at the agreed time to fetch Keowa. They left town and drove through the untouched green belt, until the glittering surface of the lake became visible through the trees to the left. It had been a bumpy flight, followed by a plunge into the sauna-like Dallas temperatures, and she enjoyed the ride in an air-conditioned electric van. After a while the driver turned off into a smaller road and then onto a private driveway that led along the water to Palstein’s house, which looked, she mused, something like what she had been expecting. Palstein would have stuck out like a sore thumb in a ranch with buffalo horns and a pillared veranda. This was an airy arrangement of Cubist buildings around green open spaces, with glass frontages, soaring slender framework and walls that seemed almost weightless; all this suited his character much better.

The driver let her out. A well-built man in slacks and a T-shirt came towards her and asked politely for some identification. Two more men were patrolling down by the quay. She handed him her ID card, and he held it to the scanner on his phone. He seemed happy with what the screen told him, gave it back to her with a smile and beckoned her to follow him. They hurried through a Japanese garden and past a large swimming-pool, to a jetty where a boat was tied up.

‘Do you feel like a ride?’

Palstein was leaning against a bollard, waiting for her in front of a trim, snow-white yacht with a tall mast and furled sails. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt and looked healthier than last time they had met in Anchorage. The sling on his arm had gone. Keowa pointed to his shoulder.

‘Feeling better?’

‘Thanks.’ He took her hand and shook it briefly. ‘It tugs a little sometimes. Did you have a good flight, Shax’ saani Keek’?’

Keowa laughed, caught out. ‘You know my Indian name?’

‘Why not?’

‘Hardly anybody does!’

‘Etiquette demands that I keep myself informed. Shax’ saani Keek’ – in Tlingit that means the younger sister of the girls, am I right?’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘And I’m probably an old show-off.’ Palstein smiled. ‘So, what do you say? I can’t offer to take you sailing, that wouldn’t work yet with my shoulder, but the outboard works and there are cold drinks on board.’

Under other circumstances Keowa would have been suspicious. But what would have seemed manipulative from anyone else, was just what it seemed coming from Palstein: an invitation from a man who liked his boat and wanted to share a trip.

‘Lovely house,’ said Keowa, once they had motored out a little way from the shore. The heat stood there like a block over the water, not a whisper of a breeze ruffled the lake surface, but all the same it was more bearable than on land. Palstein looked back and then was silent for a minute, as though considering for the first time whether his homestead could be called beautiful.

‘It’s based on a design by Mies van der Rohe. Do you know his work?’

Keowa shook her head.

‘In my view, he’s the most important modern architect there was. A German, a great constructivist and a logical thinker. He aimed to tame the chaotic mess that technological civilisation churned out and frame it with order and structure. Mind you, he didn’t consider that order necessarily meant drawing lines and boundaries – he wanted to create as much open space as possible, a seamless transition between inside and out.’

‘And between past and future?’

‘Absolutely! His work is timeless, because it gives every age what we need. Van der Rohe will never stop influencing architects.’

‘You like clear structures.’

‘I like people who can see the whole picture. By the way, I’m sure you know his most famous motto: Less is more.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Keowa nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Do you know what I think? If we could perceive the world the way van der Rohe structured his work, we’d be aware of higher-order connections and we’d reach different conclusions. Clarity through reduction. Recognise what’s in front of you by clearing away the clutter. A mathematics of thought.’ He paused. ‘But you’re not here to hear me talking about the beauty of pure number. What would you like to know?’

‘Who shot you?’

Palstein nodded, almost a little disappointed, as though he had been expecting something more original.

‘The police are looking for one man, someone frustrated, angry.’

‘Do you still agree with their profiling?’

‘I’ve said that I do.’

‘Would you care to tell me what you really think?’

He put his chin in his hands. ‘Let’s put it this way: if you want to solve an equation, you need to know the variables. All the same you’ll fail if you fall in love with one of the variables and assign it a value that it might not have, and if I’m right, this is exactly what the police are doing. The stupid thing is, though, that I can’t offer any better explanation. What do you think?’

‘Hey, well. There’s an industry going down the drain here, and you stalk the land like a gravedigger, telling people that they’re going to lose their jobs, you’re shutting down plants, you’re letting companies go to the wall; even if the truth of the matter is that you’re not a gravedigger, you’re the trauma surgeon.’

‘It’s all a question of perception.’

‘Quite. Why couldn’t it be some husband and father who just snapped? I’m just surprised that they haven’t been able to find someone like that in four weeks. The attack was filmed by several broadcasters, you’d think someone would have seen something. Someone acting suspiciously maybe, drawing a weapon, running away, something like that.’

‘Did you know that there’s a complex of buildings across from the podium, over the other side of the square—’

‘—and the police think that this is where the shot was fired from. Also that nobody remembers having seen anyone going in, or coming out after the attack. There were policemen nearby, all over the place. Doesn’t that seem odd to you? Doesn’t the whole thing look more like a professional operation, something planned out in advance?’

‘Lee Harvey Oswald fired from a building as well.’

‘Wait a moment! He fired from where he worked.’

‘But not on impulse. He must have planned his action, even if there’s nothing to say that he was a professional assassin – whatever millions of conspiracy theorists may prefer to believe.’

‘Agreed. All the same, I have to ask who the bullet was meant for here.’

‘You mean whether I was being shot as a private individual, as representing EMCO, or maybe as a symbol for the whole system.’

‘You’re not the symbol for the system, Gerald. Militant environmentalists would look for somebody else, not the only one they can sometimes work with. Perhaps it’s the other way about, and you’re a thorn in the side of militant representatives of the system.’

‘They’d have taken the chance to snuff me out while there were still decisions to be made at EMCO,’ Palstein said dismissively. ‘As you so nicely put it, I’m letting Imperial Oil go to the wall and I’m winding up our involvement in oil sands. If I had done this before helium-3, it might have made sense to get me out of the way so as to be able to keep grubbing around in the muck, but these days? Every unpopular decision I make, the circumstances make for me.’

‘Good, then let’s consider Palstein the private individual. What about revenge?’

‘Personally, against me?’

‘Have you been stepping on any toes?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Not at all? Bedded someone’s wife? Stolen their job?’

‘Believe me, right now nobody wants my job, and I don’t have time to go bedding other men’s wives. But even if there were personal motives involved, why would someone take a shot at me in such difficult terrain, out in public? He could have killed me here at the lake. In peace and quiet.’

‘You’re well guarded.’

‘Only since Calgary.’

‘Maybe somebody from your own ranks? Do you stand for something that the powerholders at EMCO don’t want at any price, no matter what the situation?’

Palstein laced his fingers together. He had switched off the outboard, and the little yacht sat on its reflection in the water as though glued in place. Behind Keowa’s head, the cheerful hum of a bumblebee lost itself in the silence.

‘Of course there are some at EMCO who think we should just sit out the whole helium-3 business,’ he said. ‘They think it’s idiotic to buy in with Orley. But that’s unrealistic. We’re going bankrupt. We can’t afford to wait anything out.’

‘Would your death have changed anything for Imperial Oil, in particular?’

‘It wouldn’t have changed anything for anyone. I wouldn’t have been able to make a few meetings.’ Palstein shrugged. ‘Well, as it is, some of them I can’t make anyway.’

‘You were supposed to fly to the Moon with Orley. He invited you.’

‘Truth be told, I asked him whether I could come along. I would have really liked to have flown.’ A dreamy look came into Palstein’s eyes. ‘As well as which, there are a lot of interesting people up there, maybe I could have talked up a joint venture or two. Oleg Rogachev, for instance, he’s worth fifty-six billion, the world’s biggest steel producer. Plenty of people trying to close a deal with him. Or Warren Locatelli, he’s worth nearly as much.’

‘EMCO and the world market leader in solar cells,’ smiled Keowa. ‘Doesn’t it make you angry that your industry used to be so powerful, and now you have to court favour with these kinds of people?’

‘It makes me angry that EMCO didn’t listen to me at the time. I always wanted to work with Locatelli. We should have bought Lightyears when the time was right.’

‘When you still had something to offer him.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s absurd, isn’t it? Doesn’t it seem like history having the last laugh – the oil bosses dictated what happened in the world for nigh on a century, and then, in the end, they weren’t in a position to turn new developments to their advantage?’

‘Every kind of rule ends in decadence. Anyway, I’m sorry I can’t help you with any more reasons for trying to kill me. I’m afraid you’ll have to keep looking elsewhere.’

Keowa said nothing. Perhaps it had been naïve of her to hope that out here, on silent Lake Lavon, Palstein would whisper dreadful secrets in her ear. Then she had an idea.

‘EMCO still has money, is that right?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You see.’ She smiled triumphantly. ‘So what you did was, you made a decision, where there would have been an alternative.’

‘And that would have been?’

‘If you’re investing in Orley Enterprises, then you must be thinking of considerable amounts of money.’

‘Of course. But really, there’s no alternative there either.’

‘Depends on who’s interested, I would say. It needn’t necessarily be about keeping EMCO in business.’

‘What else?’

‘Shutting the place down and taking the money elsewhere. I mean, who might have an interest in actually speeding up EMCO’s end? Perhaps your rescue plan actually gets in someone’s way?’

Palstein looked at her with melancholy in his eyes.

‘Interesting question.’

‘Think about it! There are thousands out of work who would reckon it makes a lot more sense for EMCO to use the money for their welfare bills, at least for as long as it takes them to get new jobs, and then the ship can go down for all they care. Then there are the creditors who don’t want to see their money blast off to the Moon. A government that has dropped you lot without batting an eyelid. Why exactly? EMCO has know-how, after all.’

‘We have no know-how. Not on the Moon.’

‘But isn’t it all resource extraction, even up there?’

Palstein shook his head. ‘It’s space travel more than it’s anything else. Then, Earth-based technologies can’t just be mapped onto the Moon one to one, especially not in our line of work. The lower gravity, the lack of atmosphere, it all brings its own problems. A couple of guys from coal-mining are involved, but otherwise they’re developing completely new techniques. If you ask me, there’s a completely different reason why the government just dropped us. The State wants to control helium-3 extraction, one hundred per cent. So Washington has grabbed the opportunity with both hands, and they’re aiming not just to get out of the armlock the Middle East had them in, they want to be free of the oil companies as well.’

‘Stick the knife in the kingmaker’s ribs,’ said Keowa mockingly.

‘But of course,’ said Palstein, almost cheerfully. ‘Oil has made presidents, but no president wants to be a puppet for private business unless he’s the biggest fish in that pond. It’s just in the nature of things that the new-crowned king wants to get rid of the kingmaker first thing, if he can. Just think of what happened in Russia in the nineties, think of Vladimir Putin – ah, heck, you’re too young to remember that.’

‘I’ve studied Russian history,’ Keowa said, smiling. ‘Putin was supposed to be the oligarchs’ puppet, but they underestimated him. Characters like that guy with the unpronounceable name—’

‘Khodorkovsky.’

‘Right, one of the robber-barons from Yeltsin’s day. Putin came onto the scene, a little bit later Khodorkovsky wakes up in a prison camp in Siberia. It happened to a lot of them.’

‘In our case, the problem solves itself.’ Palstein grinned.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Keowa insistently, ‘during the big crisis sixteen years ago governments all over the world put together packages worth billions to save the banks from sinking. There was talk of pain in the financial markets, as though it were the banks and the board members who were suffering, not the armies of small investors who lost their money and never saw it back from State guarantees. But the states helped the banks. And now they’re doing nothing. They’re letting the oil giants go to the dogs. It doesn’t matter how much they’d like to be free of them, that can’t be in Washington’s interest.’

Palstein looked at her as though at an interesting fish that he hadn’t expected to catch in this lake.

‘You want a story, no matter what it takes, don’t you?’

‘If there is one.’

‘So you’re comparing chalk and cheese just to get one. It was completely different with the banks. Banks are the very essence of the system called capitalism, they hold it up. Do you really believe that back then it was just about individual financial institutions, or about nasty managers and speculators paying themselves performance-related bonuses for no performance at all? It was about keeping the system going that even makes politics possible, it was about the temple of capitalism not crashing down, in the final analysis it was about governments’ influence on capital which had been lost over time. Let’s not kid ourselves, Loreena, the oil companies never played anything like that kind of a role. Our industry was only ever a symptom of the system, it was never part of its structure. You can do without us very well. Those of us who didn’t manage to leap aboard the alternative energies bandwagon in time are in our death throes. Why should the State save us? We’ve nothing to offer it. Back in the day we paid the politicos, which was a comfortable way for them to live, but now you expect them to prop us up? Nobody’s interested in that! The State is digging up the helium-3 because it sees the chance to become an investor in its own right again. America now has the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure its energy supply under State control, and this time it won’t let the kingmakers appear in the first place.’

‘That really sounds like a lot of eyewash,’ said Keowa dismissively. ‘You name me one capitalist system where capital and private enterprise aren’t the real powerbrokers. The USA is switching from EMCO to Orley Enterprises, that’s all. Orley will bring Washington to the Moon, build the reactors so that when the stuff gets down to the Earth it does what it has to. The whole project would never have got this far without private sector support. And the new kingmaker is sitting on his patents and laying down the law for his partners. Without him, they’d not be able to build any more elevators, any reactors—’

‘Julian Orley isn’t a kingmaker in the classic sense. He’s an alien, if you like. An out-of-worlder. ExxonMobil, later EMCO, they were Americans, they influenced elections in America and stoked foreign insurrections with their money or by running guns. Orley’s not like that, he acts like a state himself, he sees himself as a world power in his own right. That’s something that the multinationals always flirted with the idea of doing. Answerable to nobody but himself. Julian Orley would never try to topple an American president he didn’t like, he’d even have moral scruples against it. He’d simply break off diplomatic relations with Washington and recall his ambassador.’

‘He really thinks that he’s a – state?’

‘Are you surprised? Julian’s rise to power was all plotted out while governments were still rubbing their eyes and demanding a greater say in how the banks were run. It was their own idea to privatise everything they could lay their hands on, and now they saw the welfare state slipping between their fingers. So all of a sudden they wanted more State power, but were forced to concede that if you take capital into State ownership, you rob it of the very strengths that make it grow, and they went back to business as usual. People contented themselves with the idea that the depression of 2008 to 2012 was just a system overheating, that there was nothing wrong with the system itself. They squandered the chance to reinvent capitalism, and with it the chance to strengthen State power in the long term.’

Palstein was gazing off into the distance. He spoke as though giving a lecture, his voice analytical but without empathy.

‘That was the moment when private capital took the sceptre from government hands once and for all. Human beings became human resources. The parties in the democratic countries were too busy treading on one another’s toes, and the totalitarian powers were wheeling and dealing on their own behalf as always, and meanwhile the big companies forced their way into every aspect of social life and set up shop for modern society. They took over the water supply, medicine, the food chain, they privatised education, built their own universities, hospitals, old folks’ homes, graveyards, and it was all bigger, better and more beautiful than what the State had to offer. They formed an anti-war movement, they started aid programmes for the underprivileged, they took up arms against hunger and thirst and torture, against global warming, overfishing and resource depletion, against social division, the gap between the rich and the poor. And as they did so, they were reinforcing divisions by deciding who had access and who didn’t. They set up generous research budgets, and made the research serve their goals. Planet Earth had been the heritage of all humanity, but now it became an economic asset. They opened up every corner of the planet, every resource. At the same time they put a price on everything, from sources of fresh water all the way to the human genome, they took the world which had been common to all and they drew up a catalogue listing what belonged to which owner, they imposed usage fees, access protocols; if you’ll let me coin a rather loaded phrase, they put a turnstile on all Creation. Even free education and drinking water tie people into the commercial ideology once they accept the offer, it’s the vision of a brand name.’

‘Wasn’t it always like that?’ said Keowa. ‘That the many are rewarded for following the vision of the few, and if they don’t, they can expect to be cast out and punished?’

‘You’re talking about dictators and all their pomp and show. Tutankhamun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.’

‘There are other forms of dictatorship, gentler ones.’

‘Ancient Rome was a gentle dictatorship.’ Palstein smiled. ‘The Romans reckoned that they were the freest people on earth. That was something quite different, Loreena, I’m talking about rulers seizing power who don’t even have a country, their states aren’t shown on the map. The fact that the oil companies look like losing this battle doesn’t mean that industry’s grip on politics is loosening, quite the opposite. It just shows that influence has shifted. Here on Earth, Incorporated, other departments have become more influential, and to that extent, you’re absolutely right: Orley takes EMCO’s place. It’s just that EMCO acted in America’s interests, because our people were in government, but Orley doesn’t even want to govern. That’s what makes him so unpredictable. That’s what the governments are afraid of. And now, please consider the whole long history of state failure, and just ask yourself whether this kind of power transfer is really such a bad thing.’

‘Excuse me?’ Keowa cocked her head. ‘You can’t be serious?’

‘I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just want you to look at the situation as though it were an equation, look at all the variables, without fear or favour. Can you do that?’

Keowa considered this. Palstein had drawn her into a strange kind of conversation here. She had set out to interview him, and analyse him, and now the tables were turned.

‘I believe so,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘There is no ideal state of things. But there are approximations. Some of them have been hard-won. When we abolished slavery, the idea of the free citizen won out, at all levels of society. The citizen of a democratic state is bound by the laws but fundamentally free, isn’t that right?’

‘D’accord.’

‘But if you’re a member of a company, you’re property. That’s the change that’s happening all over.’

‘Also right.’

‘It seems to me about as difficult to break out of this pattern as it would be to suspend the laws of nature. The freedom of the individual is nothing but an idea by now. We live on a globe, and globes are closed systems, they offer no chance of escape and the globe is all divided up. At this very moment, while we sit here on this beautiful lake talking the whole thing through, the Moon in its orbit is being divided up, way over our heads, that’s the next globe. There’s no such thing as uncommercialised space any more.’

‘That is so.’

‘Well, excuse me, Gerald, yes, I’m a realist – but I’ll fight this to the very end!’

‘That’s your prerogative. I can understand your position, but please, think about it. You can hate the very thought of being property. Or you can make some kind of compromise with it.’ Palstein ran a rope through his fingers and laughed. All of a sudden he seemed very relaxed, a Buddha at rest. ‘And perhaps compromise is the better choice.’

Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

The sun was losing mass.

Every minute, sixty million tonnes of material in its mantle was lost, protons, electrons, helium atoms and a few other elements with walk-on roles, the ingredients for that mysterious molecular cloud that supposedly gave birth to all the celestial bodies in our system. The solar wind streamed ceaselessly outward, blowing comets off course, fluorescing in the Earth’s atmosphere as the aurorae borealis and australis, sweeping away the accretions of gas in interplanetary space and gusting out, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, to the Oort cloud. Cosmic background radiation joined the mix, weak but omnipresent, a newsfeed at the speed of light, speaking of supernovae, neutron stars, black holes and the birth of the universe.

Ever since the Earth had collided with a proto-planet named Theia and given birth to the Moon, its satellite had been defenceless against all these influences, exposed. The sun’s breath blew constantly over the lunar surface. It had no magnetic field to deflect the high-energy particles, and although they only penetrated a few micrometres deep, the lunar dust was saturated with them, and four and a half billion years of meteorite bombardment had turned the whole surface over and over like a ploughed field. Since its creation, the Moon had soaked up so much solar plasma that it held enough to bring mankind up here, hungry for resources, armed with spaceships and mining machinery to rip away the Moon’s dowry.

Sometimes there were sunstorms.

Spots formed on the sun’s surface, huge arcs of plasma leapt across the raging ocean of fire, hurling umpteen times the usual amount of radiation out into space, and the solar wind became a hurricane, howling through the solar system at twice its usual speed. When this happened, astronauts were well advised to huddle in their habitation modules and not, if at all possible, to be caught in a travelling spaceship. Each ionised particle that passed through a human cell damaged the genetic material irreparably. Every twelve years the solar hurricanes were more frequent: as recently as 2024 they had stopped shuttle traffic for a while and forced the residents at the moon bases underground. Even machines did not cope well with these particle storms, which damaged their outer skin and wiped the data stored in their microchips, caused short-circuits and unwanted chain reactions.

Everyone agreed that sunstorms were the biggest danger of manned space flight.

On 26 May 2025, the sun was breathing calmly and evenly.

As usual, its breath streamed out into the heliosphere, passed Mercury, mingled with the carbon dioxide on Venus and Mars and with the Earth’s atmosphere, blew straight through the gaseous shells of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, washed up on the shores of all their moons and of course reached the Earth’s satellite as well, each particle travelling at 400 kilometres per second. The particles ploughed into the regolith, clinging to the grey dust, spread out across the plains and the crater walls, and a few billions also collided with the female colossus at the edge of the Vallis Alpina in the lunar north, without penetrating her skin, at least in the parts reinforced with mooncrete. Gaia sat there on her cliff edge, unmoved by the cosmic hailstorm, her eyeless face turned towards the Earth.

Julian’s woman in the Moon.

Lynn’s nightmare.

The stranded ocean liner clinging to the volcanic slopes of the Isla de las Estrellas, the OSS Grand, both of these were products of her imagination. Gaia, though, was from a dream that Julian had had, in which he saw his daughter sitting on the Moon, none other, a figure all of light in front of the black brocade of space sewn with its millions of stars. Typically for him, he saw Lynn exaggerated to the scale of a metaphor, an ideal of humanity, journeying onward, wise and pure, and he woke up and called her there and then from bed and told her about his dream. And of course Lynn enthusiastically took up the idea of a hotel shaped like the human form, congratulated her father and promised to draw up preliminary designs right away, while this sublime vision that was supposed to be her actually turned her stomach so much that she couldn’t sleep for a week. Her eating disorders reached a whole new anorexic level, and she began to gobble down little green tablets to help her master her fear of failure, but somehow she managed to place the colossus at the edge of the Vallis Alpina, a giant of a woman, named after Mother Earth in ancient Greek myth.

Gaia.

And she had built this woman! The very last of her energy might have burnt away in the fury of creation, but in return, she could claim a masterpiece. At least, everybody told her that’s what it was. She felt no such certainty. The way Julian saw things, she was supposed to recover by working on Gaia; he thought that the project would be a therapy, a countermeasure for the last symptoms of that fearful illness she had just recovered from. He had barely had a clue what the illness was – about as much as if she’d been abducted by aliens and taken to some far-off planet. It was also typical that Julian had convinced himself she was ill because she was short on challenges, stifled by routine, that too much of the same old thing had made her quick blood sluggish. Lynn had been the perfect leader of Orley Travel, the group’s tourism arm, for years now. Perhaps she was yearning for something exciting, something new. Perhaps she was understimulated. She made the world run on time, but was the world enough? Back in the late 2010s private sub-orbital spaceflight had been part of the portfolio of Orley Space, along with tourist trips to the OSS and to the smaller orbital hotels, but strictly speaking, all these things were tourism as well.

And so Julian decided that it was not Orley Space that was to be entrusted with the greatest adventure in the whole history of hotel-building, but his daughter.

The whole gigantic project was made rather simpler by engineering freedoms, given that everything on the Moon weighed only one-sixth of its weight on Earth. What made it harder was that nobody had any experience at all in lunar high-rise construction. Large parts of the American moon base were underground, the rest was as low-rise as you could get. China had done away completely with the idea of having a site, and its outposts were housed in modular vehicles, built like tanks, that followed along not far behind the mining vehicles by their extraction site. Down at the lunar South Pole, not far from Aitken Crater, a small German moon base shared its little place in the sun with an equivalent French station, each housing two astronauts, while over in the Oceanus Procellarum a lively little automated gizmo surveyed the ideal spot for a Russian base that would never be built. The Mare Serenitatis was home to an inquisitive Indian robot, and Japan had a forlorn uninhabited zone around the corner. Otherwise there was nothing else on the Moon for architectural sightseers. Nevertheless the elevated maglev rails proved that in lunar gravity it was possible to build vaulting filigree frameworks that would have long ago collapsed under their own weight back on Earth.

And Gaia had to be big. This was no bed-and-breakfast operation but a monument to the glory of mankind – and of course a stopover for up to two hundred of the most solvent members of that species.

Lynn had obediently drummed up designers and engineers, and set the plans in motion under the strictest secrecy. It soon became clear that a standing figure would be too tall. So she sketched Gaia seated as an alternative, which met with Julian’s especial approval since that was just the way he had dreamed of his hotel. Since there was no question of a detailed depiction of a human body, the first thing the planning team did was fuse the legs together into one massive complex, as though the woman were wearing a narrow skirt that tailed off into a point. The buttocks and thighs were the horizontal base of the building, then below the knee the legs bent downward into the chasm without touching the wall behind them. The daring ambition of this piece of structural engineering was enough in itself to send Lynn clutching the sides of the toilet bowl, where she threw up, half-digested, most of what little food she had been able to choke down. Her tablet consumption rose to compensate, but Julian was in raptures, and the technical team said it could be done.

No need to emphasise that ‘it can be done’ was Julian’s favourite phrase.

Thus the feminine attributes of the building all had to be shown in the torso, basically a high-rise with curved walls rather than straight. It was given a waist, and then lines suggesting a bosom – which was the cause of a great deal of argument. The draughtsmen, being men, drew breasts that were far too large. Lynn declared that she was not interested in tackling the engineering aspects of porn-star-sized boobies just so as to be able to accommodate a few more guests, and she brushed them out of the picture. Suddenly she found the whole idea of a putting a woman on the Moon a hideous platitude. Julian threw in a remark that making the upper body too narrow made the building look like a man, and wasn’t it about time to let a woman represent mankind? One of the architects hinted that Lynn might be a prude. Lynn was enraged. She was no flat-chested goody-goody herself, she yelled, but what exactly was Gaia supposed to embody here? A monument to mammaries? Bust expansion? All right then, said Julian, we want curves. No, Lynn retorted, we want as boyish a figure as we can create. But nothing androgynous, protested the head of the team responsible for the façade. Nothing top-heavy either, Lynn insisted. All right then, suggested Julian, decently curved, which sounded like the best solution, but what exactly did decent mean here?

An intern scooted past, sat herself down at the computer without a word and drew a curve. Everyone watched her, looked at it. Everyone liked what they saw. Boyish, but not androgynous. The curve united them all, and the point was settled.

The shoulders were feminine but not narrow, atop towers that swept down to the ground, narrowing as they went, with a slight bend halfway and the stylised representation of open palms placed flat on the ground below. A slender neck grew up from the torso and, above that, a head in perfect proportion with the body, hairless, faceless, nothing but the noble contour of a shapely domed cranium, tilted backward a little so that Gaia was looking towards the Earth. As the whole ensemble took shape on the computer, Lynn suffered stomach cramps and cold sweats, but she patiently took on the next challenge: how to use as much glass as possible while keeping the best possible protection against radiation. She declared that Gaia’s ‘face’ should be transparent, that she wanted to put the bars and restaurants in the head, while the back of the head could be clad and reinforced, where the chefs ruled their roost. Glass all over the throat and the curve of the breasts, where the suites were, and the showpiece was to be a huge Gothic window in the belly, four levels housing reception, casino, tennis courts and sauna, then glassed-in shins, and viewing platforms on the outside of the arms. Julian complained that the great window reminded him of having to go to church, back when he couldn’t object or resist. Lynn replaced the Gothic point with a Romanesque arch, and the window stayed.

All the rest – back and shoulder, ribs and neck, the top of the thighs and the inside of the arms – was clad with armoured cast-concrete slabs made from regolith, reinforced with sheet-glass sandwiches that held water between the panes to absorb particles and minimise heat loss. If the Americans were agreeable, the concrete was to be manufactured in the existing production facilities at the North Pole, made without water just by heating up the moonrock and casting it into construction-ready components at an automated factory. Mooncrete was said to be ten times more robust than ordinary concrete, resisting erosion, cosmic rays and micro-meteorites, and it was also cheap.

Gaia’s skeleton took shape. The spine was a massive main column enclosing all the cables and ducts that the building would need, as well as three high-speed lifts. Steel ribs sprouted from the column to bear the individual floors and the outer skin, and the secondary supports were anchored deep in the rock of the plateau. There didn’t seem to be any need for cross-bracing until somebody realised that the structure would be subject to much greater stresses than initial sketches suggested, since it was surrounded by vacuum, with no atmospheric resistance to the pressure of the artificial atmosphere within. Several assumptions had to be rejected, all the parameters frantically recalculated, until the experts declared that the problem had been solved. Since when, Lynn had had a new nightmare scenario to add to her visions of the end: a hotel that would at some moment suddenly go pop.

But Gaia shone.

She glowed from within, and she glowed with the help of the powerful floodlights that bathed her flawless snow-white exterior in white light. After years of struggle, Lynn had managed it. She had finished building the woman of Julian’s dream, at least for the most part. Some of the lower-end rooms still lacked plumbing, the multi-religious chapel at the bend of Gaia’s knees needed redundant life-support systems if it was to comply with all safety standards, and as for the banal detail of a spaceport, perhaps they would build one later to allow direct connections between Gaia and the OSS. On the other hand, the Lunar Express beat any direct approach hands down. It was undeniably more fun to arrive by train, and apart from that, they had a launch field for point-to-point flights on the Moon itself. It was all fine.

Except inside Lynn’s skull.

Gaia had collapsed so often in her nightmares that she had come to long for the day when catastrophe would come. A whole office full of certificates and affidavits swore that it would never happen, but she knew better. The thought that there was something she had overlooked had driven her mad, and madness was destructive.

None of you is safe, she thought, and introduced the woman…

‘—who will be looking after your comfort and security round the clock, together with her team. My dear friends, I’m delighted to present to you our hotel director, or should I say the manager here at Gaia, Dana Lawrence.’

The Lunar Express had arrived at the hotel’s station on schedule. They had run along the edge of the canyon for a while, so that they could enjoy the astonishing view of the building opposite, then crossed over at the further end and approached Gaia in a long, wide curve. Just in front of the hotel the ground sloped upward, so the builders had chosen not to take the rails straight up but to bring them into a tunnel, with the station itself underground. The track ended 300 metres beyond the gigantic figure, in a bare hall. This time there was no vacuum as they disembarked. They walked along gangways and into a wide pressurised corridor, with conveyor bands on the floor which brought them directly under the hotel, then from there to the lifts and up to the lobby, where islands of seating and elegant writing-desks made up one organic landscape. Fish glided behind aquarium panes. Perky little trees bursting with foliage flanked a curving reception desk, and above it holographic projections of the planets circled a bright central star, a model of the solar system with a sun in the middle spewing plasma from its surface. When the guests looked upwards, they could see the great hall vanishing in a nest of criss-crossing glass bridges. Since the reception hall was here in Gaia’s glass-fronted belly, with the huge Romanesque window arching in front, there was something cathedral-like about it. They looked out across the canyon to the sunlight on the other side and the pillars of the maglev marching away into the distance. The Earth shone up in the sky, a vision of home.

Dana Lawrence nodded at the group of guests.

She had searching grey-green eyes, an oval face and copper-coloured hair worn shoulder-length. Her high cheekbones and perfectly arched brows gave her an air of British reserve, almost of unapproachability. Even the sensual curve of her lips did little to change that. Only when she took the trouble to smile was the impression dispelled, but Dana was not overly generous with her smiles. She knew exactly what impression she made, and she knew that she came across as brisk, efficient and serious – something that people flying all the way to the Moon appreciated.

‘Thank you, Lynn,’ she said, and took a step forward. ‘I hope you had a pleasant journey. As perhaps you know, in future this hotel will have two hundred guests and a hundred staff. Since you’ll have the whole place to yourselves for the coming week, we’ve taken the liberty of cutting back on staff a little, though you won’t feel the lack. Our staff are quite experienced in being able to cater to a guest’s wishes before they’ve even been voiced. Sophie Thiel—’

She turned her head to a knot of young people who stood there wreathed in smiles, all dressed in Orley Group colours. A girlish woman with freckles stepped forward.

‘—is my right hand; she leads the housekeeping department and makes sure the life-support systems function without a hitch. Ashwini Anand’ – a delicate, Indian-looking woman with a proud gaze nodded her head – ‘is responsible for room service and, together with Sophie, takes care of technology and logistics. In the past, astronauts had to endure all sorts of discomforts, first and foremost in their diet. It’s been a long road from tube rations to the five-star meal, but you now have the choice between two excellent restaurants under the direction of our head chef, Axel Kokoschka.’ A thickset, bashful man with a baby face and bald head lifted his right hand, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘He’s assisted by our sous-chef, Michio Funaki, who will, among other things, be demonstrating how to make fresh-caught sushi on the Moon.’

Funaki, a wiry man with a buzz-cut, bowed with his whole upper body.

‘All four are highly qualified and have trained in some of the best hotels and kitchens in the world, on top of which they have had two years’ experience on the Orley Space Station, making each of them a seasoned astronaut, and they know Gaia’s systems just as thoroughly as they know all the transport options hereabouts. In future Sophie, Ashwini, Axel and Michio will be the middle management here in Gaia, but for the next few days they are exclusively at your service. The same is true of me. Please don’t hesitate to speak to me if you have any concerns. It’s an honour to have you here as our guests, and we are extremely pleased to see you.’

A smile, almost infinitely diluted.

‘If there are no further questions for the moment, I would like to show you the hotel. In one hour, we will expect you for dinner in the Selene.’

Under the lobby was the casino, a ballroom with a stage, a cocktail bar and gambling tables; one floor below began Gaia’s lower belly, and the female shape spread out wider at the hips, so that to everyone’s astonishment they found two tennis courts waiting for them.

‘There are two more outside,’ said Dana. ‘For hard-core players. It’s no problem playing in spacesuits, but the trouble comes with the balls. Here on the Moon they can fly hundreds of metres at a time, so we’ve fenced those courts in.’

‘How about golf?’ Edwards asked.

‘Golf on the Moon,’ said Mimi, giggling. ‘You’d never find the ball.’

‘Oh but you do,’ said Lynn. ‘We’ve tried it with tracking beacons in the balls. Via LPCS. It works.’

‘LP which?’

‘Lunar Positioning and Communication System. There are ten satellites orbiting the Moon, letting us communicate and find our way about up here. The golf course is on the other side of the canyon, Shepard’s Green. We also call it the “satellite links”.’

‘And who’s it named after?’ asked Karla.

‘Dear old Alan Shepard,’ Julian laughed. ‘A real pioneer, he landed with Apollo 14 on the plateau south of Copernicus. The old rascal had actually brought a couple of golf balls along and a six iron head. He hit it and said it went for miles and miles and miles—’

‘I most certainly will not be playing golf up here,’ said Aileen Donoghue, emphatically.

‘It’s not as bad as all that. He never went looking for his ball, but it can hardly have travelled more than two hundred, four hundred metres. Lunar golf is fun, but the trick of it is not to put too much into your swing.’

‘Don’t they just sink down into the dust?’

‘Too light,’ said Dana. ‘Try it sometime. We also have holographic tees here in the hotel. Would you like to see the spa?’

The sauna stretched out below the tennis courts, but most impressive of all was the swimming-pool in Gaia’s buttocks. It took up almost all the available area. The walls and ceiling simulated the starry sky, a hologram of the Earth glowed with a soft light, while the bottom of the pool and the floor all around were built to look like the lunar regolith, with rugged mountain chains on the horizon. The pool itself was a double crater, as large as a lake and surrounded by recliners. The illusion of bathing on the very surface of the Moon was practically perfect.

Heidrun turned her white face to O’Keefe and smiled. ‘So, who’s a big hero? Ready for a race?’

‘Any time.’

‘Careful! You know that I’m better.’

‘Just wait and see how things work out in reduced gravity,’ Ögi chuckled. ‘Could be I’ll leave you both behind.’

‘All right then, you know we’ve just got to have a swimming race,’ Miranda announced, spreading her fingers. ‘I lo-o-o-o-ove being in the water.’

‘I got it. Huey and Dewey.’ O’Keefe lowered his eyes reverently. ‘Lord love a duck.’

They visited the floor with the conference rooms, the multi-religious chapel, a meditation centre and a sickbay that gleamed reassuringly like a new pin, then up to Gaia’s ribcage. The group all had rooms on floors fourteen to sixteen, in the outer curve of the breasts. The lobby lay almost fifty metres below them. To get to their suites from the lifts, they had to cross the glass bridges. More bridges on the lower floors were set at zigzag angles, obviously placed quite at random. None of them had a railing.

‘Anyone suffer from vertigo?’ asked Dana. Sushma Nair raised her hand hesitantly. Some of the others looked disconcerted. This time Dana’s smile was a little broader.

‘Please understand. When you jump from a two-metre-high wall on the Earth, you reach the ground 0.6 of a second later. During that time, your body has accelerated to twenty-two kilometres an hour. On the Moon, the same jump would take three times longer, and your final speed would be less than half. That’s to say that you would have to jump from a height of twelve metres to get the same effect as a two-metre jump on the Earth, or in other words, on the Moon you could happily jump from three floors up in an ordinary high-rise. This means that you really don’t need to take the lift every time you want to go downstairs. Just jump from bridge to bridge, they’re barely four metres apart, which is nothing. Anybody want to try?’

‘I will,’ said Carl Hanna.

She gave him an appraising look. Tall, muscly, deliberate in his movements.

‘The real experts can jump back up again,’ she added meaningfully.

Hanna grinned and walked onto the nearest bridge.

‘If it turns out she was lying,’ he called to the others, ‘just throw her after me, okay?’

He sprang from the bridge with Donoghue’s cackles of laughter following after. He fell, and landed four metres below without the slightest jar.

‘Like jumping down from the kerbstone,’ he called up.

In the next moment O’Keefe sailed out from the edge, then Heidrun. They both landed as though they had never moved any other way.

‘My goodness,’ said Aileen, ‘My goodness!’ and then looked at each of them in turn, with a ‘My goodness!’ for everyone.

‘C’mon, guys,’ Chucky boomed. ‘Show us what you’re made of! Up you come!’

‘You’ll have to make room.’ Hanna shooed them away with a flap of his hands. They scurried backwards. He looked thoughtfully up at the ledge. When he raised his arms, he was just about two metres fifty tall, so there was still a metre and a half to make up.

‘How tall are you?’ O’Keefe asked, disconcerted.

‘Six foot three.’

‘Hmm.’ The Irishman rubbed his chin. ‘I’m five foot nine.’

‘Could be a near thing. Heidrun?’

‘One hundred and seventy-eight – five foot ten. Whatever. Whoever doesn’t make it has to stand us all a meal.’

‘Forget it.’ O’Keefe waved the idea away. ‘It’s all free here anyway.’

‘Then back on Earth. Hey, in Zürich! All right with that? A round of schnitzels in the Kronenhalle.’

‘Meaning all of us!’ called Julian.

‘Good, we’ll all jump together,’ Hanna declared. ‘Make room, so we don’t get in one another’s way. You guys up there, get back! Ready!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Heidrun grinned. ‘Ready.’

‘And up we go!’

Hanna sprang powerfully upwards. It looked astonishingly easy. As calmly as a superhero, he flew towards the ledge, grabbed hold, boosted himself up again and landed on his feet. Next to him Heidrun fluttered down, struggling for balance. O’Keefe’s hands threatened to slip off the edge of the bridge, then he clambered up, as elegantly as circumstances allowed.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Kronenhalle is cancelled.’

‘You’re all invited anyway,’ Ögi called out, in the tones of a man who embraces the whole world. ‘This is the first time ever that a Swiss has taken a standing jump of four metres. We’ll meet again in Zürich!’

‘Optimist,’ said Lynn, so quietly that only Dana heard.

The hotel director was stunned. She acted as though she hadn’t caught that wan little word with its insidious undertones.

What was the matter with Orley’s daughter?

‘Please bear in mind,’ she said out loud to the group, ‘that in reduced gravity your body will be losing muscle mass. There are two guest lifts here in Gaia, the E1 and E2, and a staff lift, but we nevertheless recommend that you work out a lot and take the shortcut via the bridges as often as you can. Now we’ll tell you a little more about the facilities and show you the rooms.’

Hanna had Sophie Thiel show him all the secrets of his suite. There was no essential difference between the life-support systems here and those aboard the space station.

‘The temperature is set to twenty degrees Celsius, but that’s adjustable,’ Sophie Thiel explained with a wide-screen smile, pointing out a button by the door; she brushed so close past Hanna as she did so that it was only just within the limits of professionalism. ‘Your suite has its own water management system, with wonderfully sterile water—’

‘Don’t use words like that to the customers,’ Hanna said, looking about and at the same time feeling her hungry gaze on his back. No two ways about it, this Thiel woman liked muscular men. ‘It sounds as if you’re setting out to poison somebody.’

‘Well then, let’s just call it fresh water. Ha ha.’

He turned to face her. Her eyes were half-moons, their colour barely discernible; on the other hand she looked as if she had a double ration of bright white teeth and inexhaustible reserves of laughter. She was not the least bit beautiful, but very pretty for all that. A grown-up version of Pippi Longstocking, or whatever that Swedish minx was called. He had found the film on a Sunday afternoon at a hotel in Germany, while he was waiting for hours on end for to meet somebody who had been floating dead in the Rhine all the while, and he had watched it all the way through, curiously moved. A childish, clunky old three-reeler, but the childhood it showed him was so amazingly different from his own that it was practically science fiction. He found himself unable to change channels. He’d never watched a kids’ movie before, or at least never one like this.

And he’d never watched another one.

Thiel showed him how the lighting was controlled, opened up a respectable mini-bar and told him the numbers to call if he needed anything. The look in her eyes said, if only things were different. I’ve worked in the best hotels in the world. Never with guests. You could hardly say that she put herself forward. She was friendly and professional, it’s just that she was also an open book.

But Hanna wasn’t here for fun and games.

‘If there’s anything else you’d like—’

‘No, not at the moment. I’ll manage.’

‘Oh, I almost forgot! You’ll find your moon slippers in the bottom of the wardrobe.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘We couldn’t think of a better name for them. They have lead plates in the soles, in case you want additional weight.’

‘Why would I want that?’

‘Some people prefer to move on the Moon the way they move on Earth.’

‘I see! Very far-sighted of you.’

The look in her eyes said, unless you take a bit of trouble.

‘Well then – till half past eight, in the Selene.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He waited until she’d gone. The suite displayed the same discreet, elegant sense of style as the lobby. Hanna didn’t know a great deal about design, nothing in fact, but even he could tell that this was the work of experts. After all, he’d had to learn a little about style and appearances to take on this role. Also, he liked clean lines, simple rooms. Much as he loved India, he had always felt rather hemmed in by the local sense of decor, the way they crowded every surface with knick-knacks.

His gaze swept over to the window that took up the whole wall.

They couldn’t have found a better place for the hotel, he thought. The plateau below Gaia could be reached by lift, and from here he saw it stretching away towards the canyon, its tennis courts lost and lonely. You must have a fantastic view of the hotel from down there, it would look like a floodlit sculpture. Over on the left, where the cliffs dropped back and the canyon closed, a natural-seeming path curved away to the other side.

What was it that Julian Orley had said just now? Over on the other side of the Lunar Express tracks was the golf course.

A golf course on the Moon!

Suddenly Hanna felt a touch of regret that he wasn’t actually here as the person everybody thought he was. He crushed the feeling before it could get to work on him, opened his silver suitcase and delved into it for his computer, a touchscreen device of the usual sort, no bigger than a chocolate bar, and his washbag. He took an electric trimmer from the depths of the bag. With a practised twist, he clicked the trimmer apart and took out a tiny circuit board, which he plugged into the computer. Whistling tunelessly, he booted up and watched as the program uploaded and hooked into the LPCS.

A few seconds later the device alerted him that he had a message.

He opened his mailserver. The message was from a friend, reminding him not to forget Dexter and Stacey’s wedding. Unimpressed by the pending nuptials of a couple who didn’t exist anyway, he filtered out the white noise that made up the rest of the message and came up with a few more lines of text, nothing more than the addresses of several dozen internet sites. Then he uploaded a symbol – snaking reptilian necks, twisted and knotted together, all growing from a single body – and waited a moment.

Something was happening.

Words and syllables slotted together with lightning speed. The actual message took shape before his eyes. Even while the reconstruction was still under way, he knew there had been trouble. The text was short, but peremptory:

The package has been damaged. It is no longer responding to commands and cannot reach deployment under its own power. This changes your mission. You will repair the package or bring the contents to operational destination yourself. If circumstances permit, you can bring forward insertion. Act swiftly!

Swiftly.

Hanna stared at the display. The implications were quite clear, as present as an unwelcome visitor. Swiftly meant now, or as soon as possible without arousing suspicion. It meant that he would have to leave and then return while everybody was asleep.

Back to Peary Base.

Table Talk

Since they had made love free-floating in orbit, Tim had spared Amber any further speculation about the state of Lynn’s mental health, and tried to convince himself that he was showing consideration for his wife, since she was so grimly determined to enjoy the trip; in fact it was because he was quite busy enough grappling with his own dilemmas. More and more he found himself enjoying a trip that he had resolved whole-heartedly to hate: the way the trip had been arranged, Julian’s arrogant and high-handed part in it. And the more he was having fun, the more he felt a creeping adolescent sense of betrayal. He was susceptible, he had been corrupted, and by a ticket! He tried to persuade himself that it was only the overwhelming experiences and impressions that somehow, against all expectation, made him like the old snake-charmer. Hadn’t he been dead set on hating Julian, the megalomaniac, who couldn’t see that he trampled other people underfoot on his march into the future? Who neglected his nearest and dearest, or put them on pedestals, who couldn’t understand that they needed a drop of normality in their lives?

It would have been so wonderfully simple just to hate him.

But the Julian he had got to know in the narrow confines of the spaceship unnerved him by not being ignorant and egomaniacal, or at least not enough to bear out Tim’s sweeping condemnation. Rather, he reminded Tim of his childhood, when he had admired Dad so much. Reminded him of Crystal, who right up to the very moment her sanity had finally crumbled away had insisted that she had never known a more loving man than his father, who had called him her sunbeam, bringing her happiness – all too quickly, before he was gone again. She had praised and admired him, and an hour before she died, he had taken to the skies in a sub-orbital craft of his own design, slipping away into the thermosphere even though he knew how critical her condition was. He had known it – and had forgotten just long enough to break a record, win a prize and earn his son’s everlasting enmity.

Lynn had forgiven Julian.

Tim had not.

Instead he had been hard at work demonising the man. And even now he couldn’t forgive Julian, even if, or perhaps even because, he could see the pillars that held up his hatred crumbling away. This hotel couldn’t have been built solely out of greed and a ruinous sense of self-aggrandisement. There must be more behind it, a dream too overpowering to be shared with only a few family members. Whether he wanted to or not, secretly he was beginning to understand the old guy, the fever in his blood that made him push back all boundaries, his nomadic nature that let him blaze trails where others saw only dead ends, his passionate attachment to progress, innovation, and he began to grow jealous of Julian’s great love, the world. And as this change of mind smouldered away below the surface of all he thought he had believed, he felt uncomfortably aware that perhaps he was overreacting where Lynn was concerned, perhaps – without ever intending to! – he was using her as an excuse to get at Julian, that in fact he cared less about her happiness than about Julian’s guilt. He flirted with the idea that perhaps she really did feel as fine as she was always claiming, and that he had no reason to feel ashamed of mellowing towards his dad. And suddenly, over dinner in Gaia’s nose, or rather where her nose would be if she had one, with the magnificent view of the canyon before his eyes, he wanted nothing more than just to be allowed to have fun, without the ghosts of his past sitting down at table with him, the ghosts that brought out the worst in him.

‘It looks like you’re enjoying that,’ Amber said appreciatively.

They were seated at a long table in Selene, with its black-blue-silver decor, eating red mullet with a saffron risotto. The fish tasted fresh-caught, as though it had just come from the sea.

‘Bred in salt water,’ Axel Kokoschka, the chef, informed them. ‘We’ve got great big underground tanks.’

‘Isn’t it rather complicated to re-create ocean conditions up here?’ asked Karla Kramp. ‘I mean, you don’t just tip salt into the water?’

Kokoschka considered the question. ‘Not just that, no.’

‘Salinity varies from one biotope to the next down on Earth, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it take a particular chemical composition to make an environment where animal life can thrive? Chloride, sulphate, sodium, traces of calcium, potassium, iodine, and so on.’

‘Fish has to feel at home, yes, that’s right.’

‘I just want to know what’s what. Don’t a great many fish need a permanent current, a steady oxygen supply, constant temperature, all of that?’

Kokoschka nodded thoughtfully, rubbed his bald head with a shy smile, scratched industriously at his three-day beard. He said, ‘Quite,’ and vanished. Karla watched him go, flummoxed.

‘Thanks for the explanation!’ she called after him.

‘Not exactly a great talker, is he?’ grinned Tim.

She speared a piece of mullet and made it vanish between her Modigliani lips.

‘If he can make a fish taste like this up here on the Moon, for all I care he can cut his own tongue out.’

Two restaurants and two bars took up four floors in Gaia’s head, their front walls all of glass. The panes curved right the way round to where the temples would be, so that there were wide-screen views all around. Selene and Chang’e, the two restaurants, were in the lower half, with the Luna Bar above them, and right up at the top the Mama Quilla Club for dancing under the stars. From there a glassed-in airlock led to the topmost point of the whole hotel, a viewing terrace which could only be entered in a spacesuit, offering a spectacular 360-degree view. Kokoschka’s shyness aside, he served the group of guests with exemplary attention, as did Ashwini Anand, Michio Funaki and Sophie Thiel. Lynn was praised from all sides for her hotel. She let her own food go cold as she cheerfully doled out information, answered questions at length, in high spirits and visibly flattered by the attention. For a while there was no other topic of conversation but this strange new world they now walked upon, Gaia, and the quality of the food.

Then the focus of talk shifted.

‘Chang’e,’ said Mukesh Nair thoughtfully over the main course, venison with truffles, served with wafer-thin slices of toast that gleamed as the foie gras melted on them. ‘Isn’t that a term from the Chinese space programme?’

‘Yes and no.’ Rogachev took a swig of the low-alcohol Château Palmer. ‘There were a few probes of that name; the Chinese sent them up to explore the Moon at the beginning of the century. But in fact it’s a mythological figure.’

‘Chang’e, the moon goddess.’ Lynn nodded.

‘Gaia seems to have a head full of myths then,’ smiled Nair. ‘Selene was the Greek moon goddess, wasn’t she? And Luna was the goddess in ancient Rome—’

‘Even I know that,’ said Miranda gleefully. ‘Luna, and then Sol the sun god, the jerk. Eternal gods, y’know, up, down, round and round, never stopping. One comes home and the other one leaves, like a married couple working different shifts.’

‘The sun and moon. Shift workers.’ Rogachev twitched his lips in a smile. ‘That makes sense.’

‘I am so interested in gods and astrology! The stars tell us our future, you know.’ She leaned forward, overshadowing the venison scraps on her plate with the great twin stars of her breasts, which she had poured into some shimmering scrap of almost nothing for the evening. ‘And do you know what? You want to hear something else?’ She stabbed the air with her fork. ‘Some of them, the ones that really had a clue what was going on in ancient Rome, they called her Noctiluca, they lit up a temple all for her, at night on the Palatine, that’s one of the hills in the city. I’ve been there, y’know, Rome’s like full of hills, not a city up in the hills though, it’s a city on the hills, if you get me.’

‘You should tell us more about your travels,’ Nair said amiably. ‘What does Noctiluca mean?’

‘The one who lights up the night,’ Miranda said solemnly, and rewarded herself with an uncommonly large gulp of red wine.

‘And Mama Quilla?’

‘Somebody’s mom, I’d guess. Julian, what’s Mama Quilla?’

‘Well, we were rather running out of moon goddesses,’ said Julian with relish, ‘but then Lynn dug up a few more, Ningal, the wife of Sin, the Assyrian god of the moon; Annit, she was Babylonian; Kusra from Arabia, Isis from Egypt—’

‘But we liked Mama Quilla most of all,’ Lynn spoke across him. ‘Mother Moon, an Inca goddess. Even today the heirs of the Inca culture worship her as the protector of married women—’

‘Oh, really?’ Olympiada Rogacheva pricked up her ears. ‘I think the bar might turn out to be my favourite place.’

Rogachev didn’t bat an eye.

‘I find it surprising that you considered using the Chinese moon goddess,’ said Nair, picking up the thread again hastily before the embarrassment could spread.

‘Why not?’ asked Julian artlessly. ‘Are we prejudiced?’

‘Well, you are China’s greatest competitor!’

‘Not me, Mukesh. You mean the USA.’

‘Yes, of course. But nevertheless, sitting here at this table I see Americans, Canadians, English and Irish, Germans, Swiss, Russians and Indians, and until a while ago we had the pleasure of our French friends’ company. But I don’t see a single Chinese person.’

‘Don’t worry, they’re here,’ said Rogachev equably. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, they’re not a thousand kilometres from here, south-west, busy digging away at the regolith.’

‘But they’re not here.’

‘No Chinese investor has shown an interest in our project,’ said Julian. ‘They want their own elevator.’

‘Don’t we all?’ remarked Rogachev.

‘Yes, but as you have rightly pointed out, unlike Moscow, Beijing is already mining helium-3.’

‘Talking of the elevator.’ Ögi scooped up foie gras onto the dark-red meat. ‘Is it true that they’re just about to make the breakthrough?’

‘The Chinese?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘They make that announcement with admirable regularity.’ Julian smiled knowingly. ‘If it were actually the case, Zheng Pang-Wang would not take every opportunity he can find to drink tea with me.’

‘But’ – Mukesh Nair propped himself up on his elbows and massaged his imposingly fleshy nose – ‘isn’t it the case that your American friends would take lasting umbrage if you were to flirt with the Chinese, especially after the Moon crisis last year? I mean to say, are you perhaps not quite so free in your decisions as you would like to be?’

Julian pursed his lips. His face darkened, as always when he set out to explain the extent of his independence of all government power. Then he spread his arms in a fatalistic gesture.

‘Just look, what’s the reason you’re all here? Even though the nation-states all make a big noise about how effective their space programmes are, they would leap at the chance to get in line with the Americans if the offer were ever made. Or let’s say, they’d try to deal as equal partners, meaning that they would pump money into NASA’s budget and then they’d get to stake their claims. But the offer’s never made, and there’s a very good reason for that. There’s an alternative, though. You can support me, and this offer is exclusively reserved for private investors. I’m not selling know-how, but I’m inviting participation. Whoever joins in can earn a great deal of money but can’t give away any formulas or blueprints. That’s why my partners in Washington are prepared to put up with this little dinner party of ours. They know that none of your countries are going to be building a space elevator in the foreseeable future, let alone developing the infrastructure to extract helium-3. There’s no technological basis, there’s no budget, in short, there’s nothing at all. Evidently, people such as yourselves would only ever lose money by investing in your own national space programmes at home. Which is why Washington is ready to believe that we’re just talking about shares and investment here. It’s a different matter with China though. Beijing has built the infrastructure! They’re mining the helium-3! They’ve laid their groundwork, but they are working with old-fashioned technology, which limits them. That’s their dilemma. They’ve already come too far to hitch themselves to another partner, but they simply don’t have the blasted elevator! Believe me, under the circumstances there’s not one Chinese politician or investor who would put even a single yuan into my hands, unless of course—’

‘They could buy you,’ Evelyn Chambers cut in. She was following several conversations at once. ‘Which is why Zheng Pang-Wang drinks tea with you.’

‘If there were a Chinese dinner guest at the table tonight, he certainly wouldn’t be here intending to invest. Washington would conclude that I was taking offers for a transfer of know-how.’

‘Don’t they already think that, given that you meet with Zheng?’ asked Nair.

‘People meet all the time in this industry. At congresses, symposia. So what? Zheng’s an entertaining old rogue, I like him.’

‘But your friends are getting nervous anyway, aren’t they?’

‘They’re always nervous.’

‘They’re right to be. Anybody who gets up here will start digging.’ Ögi wiped his bristling moustache and threw the napkin down by his plate. ‘Why don’t you do it though, Julian?’

‘What? Switch sides?’

‘No, no. Nobody’s talking about switching sides. I mean, why don’t you just sell the space elevator technology to any country that wants to buy, and then you’d be rolling in gold? There’d be healthy competition up here on the Moon, and that would be a real boost to your reactor business. You could secure shares in the extraction side of things worldwide, you could negotiate exclusive contracts for the electricity supply, just as our absent friend Tautou controls fresh water. They sign him over whole aquifers in exchange for treatment plants and supply chain.’

‘Meaning that you would not switch from one dependent position to another,’ said Rogachev, taking up the idea, ‘but everybody would depend on you.’ He raised his glass to Julian, slightly mocking. ‘A true philanthropist.’

‘And how is that supposed to work?’ Rebecca Hsu broke in.

‘Why not?’ asked Ögi.

‘You want to let China, Japan, Russia, India, Germany, France and who knows else all have access to the elevator technology?’

‘Pay for access,’ Rogachev corrected her.

‘It’s a bad plan, Oleg. It wouldn’t take long for all of them to be knocking heads up here.’

‘It’s a big moon.’

‘No, it’s a small moon. So small that my neighbours in Red China and your American friend, Julian, have nothing better to do with their time than make for the same place to mine in, am I right? It only needed two nations,’ she said, holding up index finger and middle finger, ‘to start a squabble which is euphemistically described as the Moon crisis. The world was on the brink of armed superpower confrontation, and that wasn’t much fun.’

‘Why did the two of them go to the same place?’ Miranda asked ingenuously. ‘Accidentally?’

‘No.’ Julian shook his head. ‘Because measurements suggest that the border region between the Oceanus Procellarum and the Mare Imbrium has unusually high concentrations of helium-3, the type you’d usually find only on the dark side of the Moon. There’s a bay, the Sinus Iridum, next door and east of the Montes Jura, which seems to be similarly rich in deposits. So obviously everybody claims the right to mine there.’

Rebecca furrowed her brow. ‘And how’s that going to be any different with more nations?’

‘It should be. If we can divide the Moon up before the gold rush starts. But you’re right of course, Rebecca. You’re all right. I have to admit that I applaud the idea that space travel should be the concern of the whole human race.’

‘Perfectly understandable.’ Nair smiled. ‘You will only profit from the good cause.’

‘And us too, of course,’ Ögi said emphatically.

‘Yes, it’s a noble ideal.’ Rogachev put down his cutlery. ‘There’s only one problem, Julian.’

‘Which is?’

‘How to survive such a shift of opinion.’

Hanna

Small chocolate cakes, served lukewarm, released a gush of heavy, dark sauce when cut open, flooding out into the colourful fruit purees surrounding them. At about ten o’clock a leaden tiredness descended over the table. Julian announced that the next morning was free time, after which everybody could enjoy the hotel facilities to their heart’s content or take a look around the lunar surface nearby. There would be no longer excursions until the day after. Dana Lawrence enquired as to whether everything was to their satisfaction. They all had words of praise, Hanna included.

‘And I still don’t think that Cobain would mean anything to the kids today if we hadn’t made that film,’ O’Keefe insisted in the lift. ‘Just look where grunge has ended up. On the “lousy music” shelves. Nobody’s interested in guys like him any more. The kids prefer to listen to the artificial stuff, The Week That Was, Ipanema Party, Overload—’

‘You used to play grunge with your own band though,’ said Hanna.

‘Yes, and I gave up. My God, I think I was ten years old when Cobain died. I wonder what the hell he meant to me.’

‘Don’t give me that! You played the guy.’

‘I could play Napoleon as well, you know, doesn’t mean I’m going to try to rule all Europe. It’s always been like that, people think that whoever their heroes are at the time, they must be important. Important! There are always important albums in pop music, then twenty years later not a living soul has heard of them.’

‘Great music stays alive.’

‘Bullshit. Who knows Prince these days? Who knows Axl Rose? Keith Richards, the only thing we know about him is that he was a mediocre guitar player for a beer-hall band whose songs all sounded the same. Believe you me, the gods of pop are overrated. All stars are overrated. No two ways. We don’t go down in history, we just go down to the grave. Unless of course you commit suicide or get shot.’

‘And why does everyone these days draw on the works of the seventies and eighties? If what you say is true, then—’

‘Okay, it just happens to be in fashion.’

‘Has been for a while.’

‘And what does that prove? In ten years’ time there’ll be another nine days’ wonder. Nucleosis, for instance, that kind of thing keeps coming around again, two women and a computer, and the computer composes about half their stuff.’

‘There’s always been computers.’

‘Not always as the composer though. I’m telling you, day after tomorrow, all the stars will be machines.’

‘Codswallop. They used to say that twenty-five years ago. What came back? Singer-songwriting. Handmade music will never die.’

‘Could be. Could be we’re just too old. Good night.’

‘G’night, Finn.’

Hanna crossed the bridge to his suite and went in. He’d dutifully followed all the conversations as the evening went on, without getting caught up in knotty discussions. For a while he’d tried to share Eva Borelius’ passion for horses, and then had steered her towards music, only to find himself bogged down in German Romanticism, about which he knew less than nothing. O’Keefe saved him with a few remarks about the comatose condition of Britpop at the end of the Nineties, about Mando-prog and psychobilly, just the thing to talk about when your thoughts were elsewhere, and Hanna’s thoughts really were. Everyone would go off to sleep soon, that much was clear. Back on board the spaceship they had been warned that there’d be a price to pay for the days in zero gravity, the exertions of landing, their bodies adjusting and the flood of new experiences. The bedroom was clad with a mooncrete slab at bed height, so that in an hour at latest, nobody would be looking outside at all, and the staff lived below ground anyway.

Time to wait.

He lay down on the comically thin mattress that was nevertheless enough to support him comfortably here, weighing only sixteen kilos as he did; he put his hands behind his head and shut his eyes for a moment. If he stayed lying here, he’d fall asleep, besides which he still had plenty to do before he set out. Whistling gently, he went back into the living room and stroked his guitar-case. He strummed a brief flamenco, then turned his instrument over on his knees, felt around the edges, pressed here and there, removed the clasp where the strap clipped on and lifted up the whole back.

There was a thin sheet of material fixed to it, exactly the shape of the guitar body, covered with a tracery of fine lines. Orley’s security team hadn’t examined his luggage, as they would have done with regular tourists, but had just asked a few polite questions. Nobody had even dreamed of doubting that his guitar was just a guitar. Julian’s guests were above all suspicion, but nevertheless the organisation had not wanted to take any risks; however, an X-ray would merely have revealed that the instrument had a thicker back than usual. Only an expert would have recognised even this, and certainly wouldn’t have known that it was because it was made of two boards lying on top of one another, and that the inner board was made of a special and extremely resistant material.

With both thumbs, he began to press pieces from the sheet. They popped out with a gentle click and fell to the floor, where they lay scattered like the parts of some kind of intelligence test. Next he took the neck of the guitar off the main body and slid out a pipe, forty centimetres long, and snapped this into two equal parts. Several narrower sections of pipe fell out and rolled over the carpet. Hanna swept them together into a heap, opened his suitcase and emptied the contents of his washbag in front of him. He put the shower gel, the shampoo and the kneadable earplugs all within reach, pulled the top off one of his two tubes of moisturiser, squeezed a clear stream of what was inside onto one of the components and then pressed another against it. Straight away the moisturising cream and the plastic panel pieces reacted chemically with one another. Hanna knew that at this stage he couldn’t afford the slightest mistake, that there was no way of adjusting what he built. He worked with clarity and concentration, without haste, then unscrewed one of the golf balls, took out tiny electronic components, assembled more parts and slotted them into place. In a few minutes he was holding something flat in his hands, a device with a pipe sticking out from the front like the muzzle of a pistol, which indeed it was. It looked curiously archaic. It had a grip, but instead of a trigger, there was simply a switch. Hanna took the remaining pieces and built an identical device, examined both weapons minutely and then went on to the next stage of his work.

Here he took apart various bits of kit from his washbag and then put them back together in a different order until he had made twenty projectiles, each with chambers that had to be filled separately. Working with the utmost care, he put tiny quantities of the shower gel into the left chambers, and shampoo into the right, and then sealed the capsules. He took the short shells from the neck of the guitar and put into each one a piece of earplug and a small gelatine capsule from a pack of indigestion tablets. Last of all, he put a payload into the tip of each shell, loading five into the handle of the first weapon he had built and then five into the second. Then he put the base of the guitar back onto the body, fastening the neck in place with an expert twist. He collected the last scraps left over from the plastic sheet and shoved them under everything else in his suitcase. He packed the tubes and bottles back into the washbag and then paused as he picked up the aftershave.

Ah yes.

He looked at the bottle thoughtfully. Then he lifted the cap, held it up in front of his throat and pressed the nozzle briefly, firmly.

The aftershave was aftershave.

Nobody crossed his path as he left the suite.

He was wearing spacesuit, harness and survival pack, his helmet clamped under his arm. One of the loaded guns was nestled against his thigh, hidden in a pocket of the same material as the spacesuit so that nobody would notice it. He was also carrying five loose rounds of ammunition. Granted, he hardly expected to need to use the pistol tonight. If everything went as planned, he would never be forced to use it at all, but experience had taught him that errors could creep into the tidiest plan with the persistence of cockroaches. Some time or other the gun could turn out to be very useful indeed. From now on, it would be with him at all times.

With nobody around, Gaia’s vast body breathed the atmosphere of a monument that had outlived its builders. Far below lay the deserted lobby. He waited for the doors of E2 to slide apart, entered the cabin and pressed 01. The lift zoomed down to the underground level. He got out in the basement and followed the signs to the wide corridor they had come along just a few hours before, empty here as well, bathed in cold white light and filled with a monotonous hum. Hanna stepped onto one of the conveyor bands. It started up, passing the airlocks that led up to the lunar surface, then the vast hallway that led to the garage – as the hotel’s underground landing field was called – then a branch corridor to a narrow tunnel, two kilometres long, leading dead straight to the small helium-3 reactor that supplied Gaia’s energy during the lunar night. At the end of the corridor he stepped off the conveyor and looked through a window into the station hall. The Lunar Express was sitting on its tracks, linked to the corridor via gangways. He went inside the train and walked down between the empty seats to the driver’s chair. The on-board computer was activated, the display all lit up. Hanna entered a code and waited for authorisation. Then he turned round, took a seat in the first row and stretched out his legs.

He would have been able to do none of this if he had been just a regular guest. But Ebola had got everything ready for him. Ebola made sure that there was nothing Carl Hanna couldn’t do here on the Moon, no locked doors, no access forbidden.

Slowly, the Lunar Express drew out.

In his forty-four years of life so far Hanna had grown well used to keeping things clear-cut. In India he had taken part in a whole series of covert operations that would hardly have marked him as a friend of the country if he had been exposed. At the same time he had a circle of local friends and lived with Indian women. He worked against his hosts’ interests, undermining the federal democracy’s economic and military autonomy, but unlike many of his colleagues he didn’t spend his time in cheap bars, seedy joints or expensive clubs that held an alcohol licence. He didn’t tip toddy or whisky down his gullet or make racist remarks about the locals when he thought nobody was listening; instead he took care to integrate himself, he rented a neat little flat in the heart of New Delhi and developed a passion for curries and the spice market. He wasn’t by nature a man who made friends quickly, but over the years the country’s culture and people grew on him, and for a while he even flirted with the idea of settling down on the banks of the Yamuna. His job required a talent to deceive and a steady stream of lies, but if he wasn’t actually at work, he tried to live an absolutely normal life out there, following the country’s motto Satyameva Jayate, truth alone shall prevail. He felt no contradiction in such a Janus-faced existence, rather it helped him, Hanna the citizen, break all connections with Hanna the consummate liar, so that they never got in one another’s way.

And now too he was enjoying the ride even with the task ahead of him; he enjoyed the unending vistas of the Mare Imbrium, the play of shadows over Plato, the rugged threat of the polar mountains drawing closer, the train’s rapid climb. Once more the darkness of the crater’s shadow engulfed him as the train raced along the chasm between Peary and Hermite, towards the American moon base, at 700 kilometres an hour.

Then, without warning, it slowed.

And stopped.

The Lunar Express clung to a lonely mountainside amidst the no man’s land of the polar craters, less than fifty kilometres from the base. Hanna stood up and went to the middle of the train, where lockers lined the aisle. He rolled up the door of one of these and glanced briefly at the box of kit stored behind it, then studied the assembly plan on the back wall. He heaved down an oval platform with folding telescopic legs and eight little spherical tanks. It had short arms with nozzles that could turn in all directions, and two loaded battery packs. A thick column rising from the platform ended in a crossbar with hand-grips, between which a display gleamed. It was simplicity itself to assemble the thing: after all the grasshopper had been designed for emergencies, when the tour guide might be incapacitated and the guests had to cope for themselves. When it was fully built it stood on coiled legs and had enough room for two astronauts, the one in front steering. Hanna walked it over to the airlock, went back to the locker, took out a toolbox and a device with a readout screen, storing both under a hatch on the grasshopper’s floor. Then he put on his helmet and let the suit carry out the usual diagnostics before he started evacuation. A few seconds later the outer bulkhead opened. He climbed onto the hopper, took out his computer, clipped it on at the side of the control panel and opened the outer hatch.

The device with the readout began to sweep and search.

Calmly, he punched coordinates into the grasshopper. The LPCS would help him find the package. He was relieved to see that it was still communicating, for otherwise there would have been no chance of finding it in this wasteland of rifts and chasms. The electronic systems were all working, so the problem must be mechanical. A burst of propulsion, and the grasshopper lifted and accelerated. If he wasn’t to lose height he constantly had to create lift, while the nozzles twisted and turned to steer him. A flyer like the grasshopper was by its nature limited to a certain radius, but it was an advantage here that there was no air to provide lift for winged flyers – it meant that there was also no atmospheric pressure to brake the hopper once it got started. It had a top speed of eighty kilometres an hour, and the little round tanks could carry it an astonishing distance.

The signal was reaching him from just six kilometres away. Here in the shadow of the crater wall he was as good as blind, and totally dependent on the weak cones of light from his headlamps, racing ahead as though trying to lose him. Only the hopper’s radar system kept him from colliding with cliff edges or overhangs. A good distance away, the sunny expanses of the lowland plain met the sharp black line of the mountain shadow, and high above him blinding sunlight capped the peaks of the crater ridge. The tracks of the Lunar Express had a way back swung off between the cliffs to the next valley and the gentle plain that led up to the heights of Peary. The package should long since have been under way there of its own accord, but its signal called to Hanna from the other direction entirely, deep in the crater base.

He choked back his lift. The grasshopper lost height, its fingers of light showing deeply rutted rock. Huge sharp-edged blocks of stone reared up around him, unnerving indications that an avalanche had thundered down into the valley here not long ago – no, not thundered, had tumbled down in utter silence – then the landscape levelled off and the receiver told him that he had reached his destination. Just a few more metres.

Hanna activated the braking jets and peered about with his headlamps for a place to land. Obviously he hadn’t reached the foot of the crater wall here. The surface below was still too rubble-strewn and fissured to set the grasshopper down safely. By the time he had finally found a halfway level stretch, he was forced to hike back, leaping and sliding, a kilometre and a half, constantly at risk of losing his balance and slicing open his spacesuit on the razor-sharp blocks of stone all around. The beam from his helmet lamp wandered aimlessly over heaps of colourless rubble. Several times he had to fight for balance, raising clouds of the fine powdery moon dust, charged with static that made it cling stubbornly to his legs. Gravel leapt out of his path, uncannily alive, and then the ground below him simply stopped and the light was drowned in featureless blackness. He halted where he was, switched off the helmet lamp, opened his eyes wide and waited.

The effect was overwhelming.

A billion points of light in the Milky Way above him. No light pollution from any artificial source. Only the grasshopper far behind, a glowing dot marking its position. Hanna was as alone on the Moon as a human being could ever be. Nothing that he had ever experienced came even close, and for a while he even forgot his mission. That membrane that divides a human being from the experiential universe around him melted away. He became bodiless, at one with the non-dual world. All things were Hanna, all things were at rest within him, and he was within all things. He remembered a sadhu, a monk, telling him years ago that if he wished, he could drink the Indian Ocean dry at one gulp, a claim that Hanna had found cryptic at the time. And now he was standing here – was he standing? – drinking in the whole universe.

He waited.

After a while the hoped-for change set in, and the darkness proved less impenetrable than he had feared. There were photons travelling within it, reflected from the sunlit crater wall opposite that lunged upward from the plain. His surroundings took shape like a photograph in a bath of developing fluid, more a matter of intuition than perception, but it was enough to reveal that what he had thought to be a slope at his feet was only a sinkhole, which he could get round with just a few steps. He switched the headlamp back on. The spell was banished. He had come back to his senses and set out, keeping an eye on the computer display screen, so deep in concentration that he only saw the object when he was practically on top of it.

A heavy rod, rearing upwards!

Hanna tottered, dropping his toolkit and receiver. What was that? The beacon was at least 300 metres out! The thing had almost shattered his visor. Cursing, he began to work his way around it. A little later he knew that it was no fault of the beacon’s. This heap of scrap was irrelevant. It was a four-legged transporter crate, its tanks burnt out, lying on its side and partially hidden by rubble. His mission had been to fetch the contents, what the organisation called the package, the part of the delivery that was actually sending the signal, and bring it to the pole.

But the package wasn’t here.

It had to be further down.

When he finally found it, jammed in between boulders, it was a sorry sight. Parts of the side panel had opened up and legs and nozzles sprouted from within, some of them twisted or snapped. Fuel tanks clung to the underbelly like fat insect eggs. Obviously the package had begun to unfold and come to life as it had been designed to do, in order to make its way to deployment, when something unforeseen had happened.

And suddenly Hanna knew what that had been.

His eyes drifted over to the brightly lit peaks. He had no doubt that right from the start, the landing unit had set down too close to the crater’s edge. Not a problem in itself. The designers had built in extra tolerances, including for the event that the carrier and its package crashed in the crater. The mechanical parts were supposed to be protected for as long as it took for the sensors to report that it was in a stable position, or give any other indication that the landing had been successful. After which the package was supposed to separate from the undercarriage, unfold its legs once it was at rest, and scuttle away. Obviously the sensors had made their report, but at the very moment the limbs were unfolding, parts of the uphill slope had slipped, carrying the robot along with it. The onrushing rocks had shattered its extremities, and the package had lost all mobility.

Moonquake?

Possibly. The Moon was nothing like the calm and placid place that had once been thought. Laymen might not believe it, but there were frequent tremors. Enormous variations in temperature built up tensions which discharged themselves in massive quakes, and the gravitational pull of sun and Earth could tug at deep-lying strata of the moonrock, which was why Gaia had been built to withstand quakes topping 5 on the Richter scale. Hanna inspected the damaged axles and nozzles, wanting to leave no possibility untried. After twenty sweaty minutes of wrestling with the wreck, he had to concede that there was no fixing it. The loss of some of the spider legs might have been overcome, but the unwelcome fact was that one of the jet nozzles was partially torn away, and another was nowhere to be seen.

The best-laid plans of mice and men, thought Hanna. First there had been Thorn’s accident, and then this. All this should have been his job. He should have taken care of the package a year ago, but Thorn’s corpse was drifting out there somewhere in the universe.

Expecting further disappointments, he unbolted the hatch at the back, opened the container and shone his torch inside, but there at least it all seemed undamaged. Hanna breathed freely again. If the cargo had been lost, that would really have been the end; everything else was mere inconvenience. He took the detector in his hand and checked the seams. Intact. No harm done.

Carefully, he fetched it out.

This simply meant that he would have to take the package across for deployment himself. No problem there. There was enough room on the grasshopper platform. For a moment he considered informing mission control, but time was running short. There was no alternative anyway. He had to act. It was best to be back in the hotel before the others started rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

Best never to have been away.