Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘And what else does Olinda have to say?’

  ‘You shouldn’t buy anything Chinese. China’s going to go under.’

  ‘Because of the trade deficit?’

  ‘Because of Jupiter.’

  ‘And what sort of dress are you wearing?’

  ‘This? Cute, isn’t it? Dolce & Gabbana.’

  ‘You should take it off.’

  ‘What, here?’ Miranda looked furtively around and lowered her voice. ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s Chinese.’

  ‘Oh, stop! They’re Italians, they—’

  ‘It’s Chinese, darling,’ Evelyn repeated with relish. ‘Rebecca Hsu bought Dolce & Gabbana last year.’

  ‘Does she have to buy everything?’ For a moment Miranda looked frankly hurt. Then the sun came out once again. ‘Never mind. Maybe Olinda made a mistake.’ She spread her fingers and shook herself. ‘Anyway, I’m reaaally looking forward to the trip! I’m going to squeal the whole time!’

  Evelyn didn’t doubt for a moment the serious intent behind this threat. She glanced around and saw the Nairs, the Tautous and the Locatellis in conversation. Olympiada joined the group, while Oleg Rogachev studied her, nodded to her and went to the bar. He immediately came over with a glass of champagne, handed it to her and assumed his familiar, sphinx-like smile.

  ‘So we’re going to be exposed to your judgement in space,’ he said in a strong Slavic accent. ‘We’ll all have to be very careful what we say.’

  ‘I’m here as a private individual.’ She winked at him. ‘But if you really want to tell me anything—’

  Rogachev laughed quietly, without losing his icy expression.

  ‘I’m sure I will, not least for the pleasure of your company.’ He looked out to the platform. By now the sun was low over the volcano, and bathed the artificial island in warm colours. ‘Have you been through preparatory training? Weightlessness isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.’

  ‘In Orley Space Centre.’ Evelyn took a sip. ‘Zero-gravity flights, simulation in the immersion tank, the whole caboodle. You?’

  ‘A few sub-orbital flights.’

  ‘Are you excited?’

  ‘Thrilled.’

  ‘You do know what Julian is trying to do by organising this event?’

  The remark hovered in the room, waiting to be picked up. Rogachev turned to look at her.

  ‘And now you’re interested to find out my opinion on the matter.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t thinking seriously about it.’

  ‘And you?’

  Evelyn laughed.

  ‘Forget it. In this company I’m the church mouse. He can hardly have had his beady eyes on my savings.’

  ‘If all church mice had to reveal the state of their finances, Evelyn, mice would run the world.’

  ‘Wealth is relative, Oleg, I don’t have to tell you that. Julian and I are old friends. I’d love to convince myself that it was that that persuaded him to make me a member of the group, but of course I realise that I manage capital that’s more important than money.’

  ‘Public opinion.’ Rogachev nodded. ‘In his place I’d have invited you too.’

  ‘You, on the other hand, are rich! Almost everybody here is rich, really rich. If each of you throws only a tenth of his wealth into the jackpot, Julian can build a second lift and a second OSS.’

  ‘Orley won’t allow a shareholder to influence the fate of his company to any great extent. I’m a Russian. We have our own programmes. Why should I support American space travel?’

  ‘Do you really mean that?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Because you’re a businessman. Nation states may have interests, but what good is that if you lack money and know-how? Julian Orley dusted off American state space travel and at the same time sealed its fate. He’s the boss now. Worth mentioning to the extent that space travel programmes are now almost exclusively in private hands, and Julian’s lead in the sector is astronomical. Even in Moscow people are supposed to have been saying that he doesn’t give a fig for the interests of nation states. He just looks for people who think the same way as he does.’

  ‘You might say he doesn’t give a fig for loyalty either.’

  ‘Julian’s loyalty is to ideals, believe it or not. The fact is that he could get on perfectly well with NASA, but NASA couldn’t cope with him. Last year he presented the White House with a plan for how a second lift could be financed by the Americans, and that would have meant that he was putting himself in a highly dependent position as a supplier of know-how. But rather than using the opportunity to involve him, Congress hesitated and expressed concern. America still hasn’t worked out that for Julian it’s just an investor.’

  ‘And because this investor seems to lack a certain potency at the moment, he’s extending the circle of his possible partners.’

  ‘Correct. He couldn’t care less whether you’re a Russian or a Martian.’

  ‘Even so. Why shouldn’t I invest in my country’s space travel?’

  ‘Because you have to ask yourself whether you want to entrust your money to a state which, while it might be your homeland, is hopelessly underperforming in technological terms.’

  ‘Russian space travel is just as privatised and efficient as the American version.’

  ‘But you haven’t got a Julian Orley. And there isn’t one on the horizon, either. Not in Russia, not in India, not in China. Not even the French and the Germans have one. Japan is running on the spot. If you invest your money in the attempt to invent something that other people invented ages ago, just for the sake of national pride, you’re not being loyal, you’re being sentimental.’ Evelyn looked at him. ‘And you aren’t inclined towards sentimentality. You’re sticking to the rules of the game in Russia, that’s all. And you feel no more connected to your country than Julian feels to anybody.’

  ‘You think you know so much about me.’

  Evelyn shrugged. ‘I just know that Julian would never pay for anyone to take the most expensive trip in the world simply out of love for his fellow man.’

  ‘And you?’ Rogachev asked an athletically built man who had joined them in the course of the conversation. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘An accident.’ The man came closer and held out his hand to Evelyn. ‘Carl Hanna.’

  ‘Evelyn Chambers. You’re referring to the attempt on Palstein’s life?’

  ‘He should have been flying instead of me. I know I shouldn’t be pleased in the circumstances—’

  ‘But you’ve been promoted and you’re pleased anyway. That’s completely understandable.’

  ‘Nice to meet you anyway. I watch Chambers whenever I can.’ His eyes turned to the sky. ‘Will you be making a programme up there?’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll keep it private. Julian wants to shoot a commercial with me, in which I praise the beauties of the universe. To stimulate space tourism. Do you happen to know Oleg Alexeyevich Rogachev?’

  ‘Rogamittal.’ Hanna smiled. ‘Of course. I think we even share a passion.’

  ‘And that would be?’ Rogachev asked carefully.

  ‘Football.’

  ‘You like football?’

  The Russian’s impenetrable, foxy face grew animated. Aha, Evelyn thought. First clue about Hanna. She looked with interest at the Canadian, whose whole body seemed to consist of muscle, although without the awkwardness that bodybuilders so often had. With his close-shaven hair and beard, his thick eyebrows and the little cleft in his chin, he could easily have played the lead in a war movie.

  Rogachev was usually a little frosty with strangers, but the mention of football made him seem suddenly almost euphoric. Straight away they were discussing things that Evelyn didn’t understand, so she took her leave and moved on. At the bar she ran into Lynn Orley, who introduced her to the Nairs, the Tautous and Walo Ögi. She at once took a liking to the swaggering Swiss. Complacent, and with a parodic tendency to overdramatise things, he immediately proved to b
e open and attentive. In general, no one was talking about anything but the imminent trip. To her delight, Evelyn didn’t have to try to attract Heidrun Ögi’s attention, as she cheerfully waved her over to introduce her, with furtive delight, to the tormented-looking Finn O’Keefe. Over the next five minutes Evelyn didn’t manage to ask him a single question, and said she presumed it would stay that way.

  ‘For ever?’ O’Keefe asked slyly.

  ‘For the next fortnight,’ she confessed. ‘Then I’ll give it another go.’

  Not staring at Heidrun was a far more hopeless task than escaping the gravitational pull of Miranda Winter’s breasts – undulating landscapes of promised delight, but nothing in the end to lose your head over. Miranda, by and large, was a simple design. Sex with her, Evelyn guessed, would be like licking out a honey-pot, sweet and enticing, a bit ordinary after a while, eventually boring and possibly making you feel a bit sick afterwards. Heidrun’s pigment-free, anorexic body, on the other hand, her white hair, snow-white all over, promised an intense erotic experience.

  Evelyn sighed inwardly. She couldn’t afford any kind of adventure with this lot, particularly since everything about Heidrun shouted that she wasn’t interested in women.

  At least not that way.

  A little way off she spotted Chuck Donoghue’s barrel shape, with its complete lack of a neck. His chin jutted bossily forwards, his thinning, reddish hair blown into a sculpture on his head. He had just launched into a noisy diatribe directed at two women, one tall and bony, with strawberry-blonde hair, the other dark and delicate, looking as if she had emerged from a painting by Modigliani. Eva Borelius and Karla Kramp. At regular intervals Chuck’s lecture was counterpointed by Aileen Donoghue’s maternal falsetto. With her rosy cheeks and silver hair, you might have expected to see her flitting off at any moment to serve homemade apple pie, which according to rumours she did with great enthusiasm when she wasn’t helping Chuck run their hotel empire. To talk to Borelius, Evelyn would have had to put up with Chuck’s teasing, so instead she went in search of Lynn, and found her in conversation with a man who looked uncannily like her. The same ash-blond hair, sea-blue eyes, Orley DNA. Lynn was saying, ‘Don’t worry, Tim, I’ve never been better,’ as Evelyn walked in.

  The man turned his head and looked at her reproachfully.

  ‘Excuse me. Didn’t mean to interrupt.’ She made as if to go.

  ‘Not at all.’ Lynn held her back by the arm. ‘Do you know my brother?’

  ‘Great to meet you. We hadn’t had the pleasure.’

  ‘I’m not part of the company,’ Tim said stiffly.

  Evelyn remembered that Julian’s son had turned his back on the firm years before. The siblings were close, but there were problems between Tim and his father that had started when Tim’s mother had died, in a state of total insanity, it was rumoured. Lynn had never revealed any more than that, except that Amber, Tim’s wife, didn’t share her husband’s dislike of Julian.

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where Rebecca is?’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Rebecca?’ Lynn frowned. ‘She should be down at any moment. I just dropped her off at her suite.’

  In point of fact Evelyn couldn’t have cared less where Rebecca Hsu had got to. She just had a distinct feeling of being about as welcome as a case of shingles, and tried to find a reason to slope quietly off again.

  ‘And otherwise? Do you like it?’

  ‘Brilliant! – I heard that Julian’s not getting here until the day after tomorrow?’

  ‘He’s stuck in Houston. Our American partners are causing a few problems.’

  ‘I know. Word gets around.’

  ‘But he’ll be there for the show.’ Lynn grinned. ‘You know him. He loves making the big entrance.’

  ‘But it should be you in the limelight,’ said Evelyn. ‘You’ve sorted everything out fantastically well, Lynn. Congratulations! Tim, you should be proud of your sister.’

  ‘Thanks, Evie! Many thanks for that.’

  Tim Orley nodded. Evelyn felt more unwelcome than ever. Curious, she thought, he’s not a nasty guy. What’s his problem? Is he pissed off with me for some reason? What did I burst in on?

  ‘Are you flying with us?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m, er … Of course, this is Lynn’s big moment.’ He forced a smile, put his arm around his sister’s shoulder and drew her to him. ‘Believe me, I’m incredibly proud of her.’

  There was so much warmth in his words that Evelyn had every reason to feel touched. But the undertone in Tim’s voice said, clear off, Evelyn.

  She went back to the party, slightly flummoxed.

  * * *

  The twilight phase was brief but dreamlike. The sun adorned itself in blood-red and pink before drowning itself in the Pacific. Darkness fell within a few minutes. Because of the Stellar Island Hotel’s location on the eastern slope, for most of those present the sun didn’t disappear into the sea but slipped behind the volcanic peaks; only O’Keefe and the Ögis were able to enjoy its big farewell. They had left the party and driven up to the crystal dome, from where you had a view of the whole island including its inaccessible, jungle-covered western side.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Heidrun, staring out. ‘Water on all sides.’

  ‘Hardly a shattering observation, darling.’ Ögi’s voice emerged from the cloud of his cigar-smoke. He had used the opportunity to get changed, and was now wearing a steel-blue shirt with an old-fashioned matching cravat.

  ‘As you wish, jerk.’ Heidrun turned towards him. ‘We’re standing on a bloody great stone in the Pacific.’ She laughed. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  Ögi blew a spiral galaxy into the approaching night.

  ‘As long as we don’t run out of Havanas, it means we’re in good hands here.’

  As they talked, O’Keefe wandered aimlessly around. The terrace was now half covered by the massive glass dome to which it owed its name. Only a few tables were set for dinner, but Lynn had told him that at peak period there was room for more than three hundred people here. He looked to the east, where the platform stood brightly lit in the sea. It was a fantastic sight. Except that the straight line was absorbed by the dark of the sky.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll wish you were standing back on this bloody great stone,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ Heidrun flashed her teeth. ‘But maybe I’ll be holding your little hand – Perry.’

  O’Keefe grinned. After plunging lemming-like into the depths of non-commercial film, and choosing his roles in terms of their inappropriateness, he had been more surprised than anyone else when he was awarded an Oscar for his impersonation of Kurt Cobain. Hyperactive became the certificate of his ability. No one however could ignore the fact that the famously shy Irishman with the amber gaze, the regular features and sensual lips was already yesterday’s man, seen only in unwieldy low-budget and no-budget productions, cryptic films d’auteur and blurry Dogme dramas. Box-office poison had become a drug. Cleverly, he had avoided ogling blockbusters and gone on making the sort of things that he liked, except that all of a sudden everybody else liked them too. Azerbaijani directors could still book him for a pittance, if he liked the subject-matter. He cultivated his origins and played James Joyce. He acted out the lives of junkies and homeless people. He did so much both in front of the camera and behind it that his past blurred: born in Galway, mother a journalist, father an operatic tenor. Learned piano and guitar as a boy, acted in theatre to overcome his shyness, bit-parts in TV series and advertisements. Worked his way up from minor to major roles at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, shone with the Black Sheep in O’Donoghue’s pub, wrote poetry and short stories. Even spent a year living with tinkers, Irish gypsies, out of a pure romantic connection with good old Éire. So convincing, finally, as a rebellious farmer’s son in the television series Mo ghrá thú, that Hollywood called.

  Or so they said, and it sounded good, and was somehow true.

  That shy Finn had been short-tempered as a child, and had knocked out hi
s fellow pupils’ teeth, that he was seen as a slow learner and, unable to decide what to be, had at first done nothing at all, was rarely mentioned. Nor were his fallings-out with his parents, his immoderate alcohol consumption, the drugs. He had no memory at all of his year with the tinkers, because he had spent most of his time pissed, or high, or both. Once he had been successfully socialised in the Abbey Theatre, a German producer had had him in mind for the main role in Süskind’s classic Perfume, but while Ben Wishaw had auditioned, O’Keefe had fallen noisily asleep on top of a Dublin prostitute and hadn’t even turned up for the appointment. Not a word about losing his day job because of similar escapades and being thrown out of the TV series, followed by two more years of neglect among the travelling people, until he had finally been able to effect a reconciliation with his parents and gone into rehab.

  It was only then that the myth began. From Hyperactive until that remarkable day in January 2017, when an unemployed screenwriter of German origins in Los Angeles got hold of a fifty-year-old pulp novel, that marked the start of an unparallelled literary phenomenon, an intergalactic soap opera that had never been published in America but which could claim to be the most successful sci-fi series of all time. Its hero was a space traveller called Perry Rhodan, whom O’Keefe played as cheerfully as ever, without worrying about success. He interpreted the role in such a way that perfect Perry became a hot-headed fool, who built Terrania, the capital of humanity, more or less by accident in the Gobi Desert, and stumbled out from there into the great expanses of the Milky Way.

  The cinema release beat everything that had gone before. Since then O’Keefe had played the space hero in two additional films. He had taken a training course at the Orley Space Centre, and struggled against nausea on board a Boeing 727 converted to take zero-gravity flights. On that occasion he had met and liked Julian Orley, since which time they had formed a loose friendship based on their shared love of cinema.

  But perhaps I’ll hold your little hand—

  Why not, thought O’Keefe, but refrained from replying accordingly to avoid annoying Walo, because he strongly suspected Heidrun of loving the jovial Swiss. You didn’t have to know the two of them any better to have a sense that that was the case. It was expressed less in what they said to each other than in the way they looked at and touched each other. Better not to flirt.