‘I’m just out of the shower,’ she said apologetically. ‘Find anything nice?’
‘Here,’ Lynn said, and sent a jpeg of the avatar, which appeared simultaneously on Mimi’s display.
‘Hey, good choice. Really suits you.’
‘Great. I’ll tell the staff. Someone will come and collect the things from you.’
‘Fine. See you later, then.’
‘Yes, see you later.’ Lynn smiled. ‘And thank you!’
The projection disappeared. At the same time Lynn’s smile went out. Her gaze slipped away. Blank-faced, she stared straight ahead and recapitulated Julian’s last remark, before she had left the viewing terrace:
I’m really proud of you. You’re the greatest. You’re perfect.
Perfect.
So why didn’t she feel she was? His admiration weighed down on her like a mortgage on a house with a glorious façade and rotten pipes. Since stepping inside the suite, she had been walking as if on glass, as if the floor might collapse. She pushed herself up, dashed to the bathroom and took two little green tablets that she washed down with hasty sips of water. Then she thought for a moment and took a third.
Breathing, feeling your body. Taking a good deep breath, right into your belly.
After she had stared at her reflection for a while, her gaze wandered to her fingers. They were gripping the edge of the basin, and the sinews stood out on the back of her hands. For a moment she considered wrenching the basin from its base, which of course she wouldn’t be able to do, except that it might keep her from screaming.
You’re the greatest. You’re perfect.
Just fuck off, Julian, she thought.
At that moment a pang of shame ran through her. Heart thumping, she slumped to the floor and performed thirty panting sit-ups. In the bar she found a bottle of champagne and tossed a glass down, even though she never normally drank alcohol. The black hole that had opened up beneath her began to close. She called room service, told them to go to Mimi Parker’s suite and went into the shower. When she stepped into the lift a quarter of an hour later, wearing a blouse and trousers and with her hair down, Aileen Donoghue was already waiting there and looked as expected. Christmas baubles dangled from her earlobes. A necklace bit into the big valley of her bosom.
‘Oh, Lynn, you look—’ Aileen struggled for words. ‘Good God, what should I say? Beautiful! Oh, what a beautiful girl you are! Let me give you a hug. Julian is rightly proud of you.’
‘Thanks, Aileen,’ smiled Lynn, slightly crushed.
‘And your hair! It suits you much better down. I mean, not that you should always wear it down, but it brings out your femininity. If only you weren’t— Oops.’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Say it.’
‘Oh, you young things are all so thin!’
‘Aileen, I weigh fifty-eight kilos.’
‘Really?’ That plainly wasn’t the answer that Aileen wanted to hear. ‘So in a minute, once we’re upstairs, I’ll make you a plate of something. You need to eat, my dear! People have to eat.’
Lynn looked at her and imagined tearing the Christmas balls out of her ears. Zip, zap, so fast that her earlobes ripped and a fine mist of blood sprayed onto the mirrored glass of the lift.
She relaxed. The green pills were starting to work.
‘I’m hugely looking forward to tomorrow,’ she said brightly. ‘When it gets going. It’ll be really lovely!’
23 May 2025
THE STATION
Orley Space Station (OSS), Geostationary Orbit
Evelyn Chambers was dreaming.
She was in an odd room about four metres high and just over five metres deep, and six metres wide. The only level surface was formed by the back wall; ceiling and floor merged into one another, leading her to conclude that she was inside an elliptical tube. In each end of it the architects had set a circular bulkhead at least two metres in diameter. Both bulkheads were sealed, although she didn’t feel closed in, quite the opposite. It promised the certainty of being safely accommodated.
When the rooms had been furnished, the plans must have been temporarily upside down. Like a flying carpet, an expansive bed hovered just above the floor; there was a desk with seats, a computer work station, a huge display. Subdued lighting illuminated the room, a frosted glass door hid shower, wash-basin and toilet. The whole thing resembled a futuristically designed ship’s cabin, except that the comfortable, red-upholstered sofas hung below the ceiling – and the wrong way up.
But the most remarkable thing was that Evelyn Chambers received all these impressions without touching the room or its furniture with a single cell of her body. Just as naked as the choice combination of Spanish, Indian and North American genes had made her, flattered by nothing but fresh air, set to a pleasant 21 degrees Celsius, she floated above the curved, three-metre panoramic front window, and looked at a starry sky of such ineffable clarity and opulence that it could only have been a dream. Shimmering just under 36,000 kilometres below her was the Earth, the work of an Impressionist artist.
It must be a dream.
But Evelyn wasn’t dreaming.
Since her arrival the previous day she couldn’t get enough of her far-away home. There was nothing to obstruct the view, no looming lattice mast, no antenna, no module, not even the space elevator cable running towards the nadir. In a quiet voice she said, ‘Lights out,’ and the lights went out. There was, indeed, a manual remote control for the service systems, but she didn’t want to risk changing her perfect position by waving the thing around. After fifteen hours on board the OSS she had slowly started to get used to weightlessness, even though she was deeply unsettled by the lack of up and down. She was all the more surprised not to have fallen victim to the space sickness people talked about, unlike Olympiada Rogacheva, who lay strapped tightly to her bed, whimpering and wishing she had never been born. Evelyn, on the other hand, felt pure bliss, like the memory of Christmas, pure delight distilled into a drug.
She barely dared breathe.
Staying poised over a single point wasn’t easy, she noted. In a state of weightlessness you involuntarily assumed a kind of foetal position, but Evelyn had stretched her legs and crossed her arms in front of her chest like a diver propelling himself over a reef. Any hasty movement might mean that she would start spinning, or drift away from the glass. Now that all the light had gone out and the room, furniture included, had half vanished, every cell of her brain wanted to savour the illusion that there was no protecting shell surrounding her, that she was in fact floating like Kubrick’s star-child, naked and alone above this wondrously beautiful planet. And suddenly she saw the tiny, shimmering little ball spinning away and realised that her eyes had filled with tears.
Was this how she had imagined the whole thing? Had she been able to imagine anything at all twenty-four hours ago, when the helicopter came down over the platform in the sea and the travellers got out, the night tugging at their coats and a magnificent sunrise failing to attract anyone’s attention?
* * *
From a distance the platform looked imposing and mysterious, and even a little scary; now they are actually there it exerts a fascination of a quite different and much deeper kind. First the feeling hits that this isn’t Disneyland and there’s no going back, that they will soon be swapping this world for a different, alien one. Evelyn isn’t surprised to see some members of the group repeatedly looking across at the Isla de las Estrellas. Olympiada Rogacheva, for example, Paulette Tautou – even Momoka Omura casts stolen glances at the ragged cliffs, where the lights of the Stellar Island Hotel are beaming with an unexpectedly cosy radiance, as if warning them to leave this nonsense and come home, to freshly squeezed fruit-juices, sun-cream and the cries of gulls.
Why us? she asks herself irritably. Why is it always the women who get queasy at the idea of getting into the lift? Are we really such cowardy-custards? Forced by evolution into the role of worry-warts because nothing must be al
lowed to endanger the brood, while males – dispensable once robbed of their sperm – can advance calmly into the unknown and die there? At that moment she notices that Chuck Donoghue is sweating an unusual amount, Walo Ögi is displaying distinct signs of nerves, she sees the tense expectation on Heidrun Ögi’s face, Miranda Winter’s childlike enthusiasm, the intelligent interest in Eva Borelius’ eyes, and is reconciled to her circumstances. Together they walk up to the multi-storey cylinder of the terminal, and all of a sudden she realises why she was getting agitated before.
Embarrassing – but even she is utterly terrified.
‘To be perfectly honest,’ says Marc Edwards, who is walking along beside her, ‘I don’t have a very good feeling about this.’
‘You don’t?’ Evelyn smiles. ‘I thought you were an adventurer.’
‘Hmm.’
‘That’s what you said on my show, at least. Diving into shipwrecks, diving into caves—’
‘I suspect this is going to be different from diving.’ Edwards stares pensively at his right index finger, its first joint missing. ‘Completely different.’
‘Incidentally, you never told me how that happened.’
‘I didn’t? A puffer-fish. I annoyed him, on a reef off Yucatán. If you tap them on the nose they get angry, retreat and inflate themselves. I kept tapping him’ – Edwards pesters an imaginary puffer-fish – ‘except there was coral everywhere, he couldn’t get any further back, so the next time I did it he just opened his mouth. My finger disappeared into it for a moment. Yeah. You should never try to pull your finger out of a fish’s mouth, certainly not by force. By the time I pulled it out again, there was just a bone sticking out.’
‘You won’t have to worry about things like that up there.’
‘No.’ Edwards laughs. ‘It’ll probably be the safest holiday of our lives.’
They enter the terminal. It’s perfectly circular, and looks even bigger from inside than it seemed from outside. High-powered spotlights illuminate two structures, one in front of the other, identical in every detail but mirror images of one another. At the centre of each the cable stretches vertically upwards from its mooring in the ground, surrounded by three barrel-shaped mechanisms oscillating in appearance between cannons and searchlights, their muzzles pointing to the sky. A double grille runs around each of the structures to head height. Its mesh is wide enough for a person to slip through, but its presence indicates quite clearly that this would be a bad idea.
‘And you know why?’ Julian calls, in a dazzlingly good mood. ‘Because direct contact with the cable can cost you a body-part in a fraction of a second. You must bear in mind that it’s thinner than a razor-blade, but incredibly hard. If I ran a screwdriver over the outside edge, I could slice it to shreds. Does anyone want to have a go with a finger? Does anyone want to get rid of their partner?’
Evelyn can’t help thinking of what a journalist once said: ‘Julian Orley doesn’t go on stage, the stage follows him around.’ Accurate, but the truth still looks a bit different. You actually trust the guy, you believe every single word he says, because his confidence is enough on its own to dissolve doubts, ifs and buts, nos and maybes, like sulphuric acid.
Motionless, and about twenty metres above the ground, the two lifts dangle like insects from the cables. From close to they look less like space shuttles, not least because they have no wings or tail-planes. Instead, what you notice is the wide undersides, mounted with photovoltaic cells. Compared with two days ago, when they came back from orbit, their appearance has changed slightly, in that the tanks of liquid helium-3 have been swapped for rounded, windowless passenger modules. Walkways lead from a high balustrade to open entrance hatches in the bellies of the cabins.
‘Your technology?’ asks Ögi, walking along beside Locatelli, eyes on the lifts’ solar panels.
Locatelli stretches, becoming half an inch taller. Evelyn can’t help thinking of the late Muammar al-Gaddafi. The similarity is startling, and so is the monarchical posture.
‘What else?’ he says condescendingly. ‘With the traditional junk those boxes wouldn’t get ten metres up.’
‘They wouldn’t?’
‘No. Without Lightyears, nothing here would work at all.’
‘Are you seriously trying to claim the lift wouldn’t work without you?’ smiles Heidrun.
Locatelli peers at her as if she is a rare species of beetle. ‘What do you know about these things?’
‘Nothing. It just looks to me as if you’re standing there with an electric guitar around your neck claiming that an acoustic would produce nothing but crap. Who are you again?’
‘But, mein Schatz’ – Ögi’s bushy moustache twitches with amusement – ‘Warren Locatelli is the Captain America of alternative energies. He’s tripled the yield from solar panels.’
‘Okay,’ murmurs Momoka Omura, who is walking along beside him. ‘Don’t expect too much of her.’
Ögi raises his eyebrows. ‘You may not believe it, my little lotus blossom, but my expectations of Heidrun are exceeded again every day.’
‘In what respect?’ Momoka gives a mocking grimace.
‘You couldn’t even imagine. But nice of you to ask.’
‘Anyway, with traditional energy those things on the cable would creep up at best,’ says Locatelli, as if the bickering isn’t going on around him. ‘It would take us days to get there. I can explain it to you if you’re interested.’
‘I’m not sure, my dear. Look, we’re Swiss, and we do everything very slowly. That’s why we built that particle accelerator all those years ago.’
‘To produce faster Swiss people?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Doesn’t it keep breaking down?’
‘Yes, quite.’
Evelyn stands close behind them, absorbing it all like a bee sucking nectar. She likes this kind of thing. It’s always the way: put a lot of birds of paradise in a cage, and the feathers will fly.
The get-up gives a hint of what’s to come. First everyone is dressed in silver and orange overalls, the colours of Orley Enterprises, then the whole group heads up to the gallery from which the walkways descend to the lifts. Next they make the acquaintance of a powerfully built black man, whom Julian introduces as Peter Black.
‘Easy to remember,’ Black says cheerfully, and shakes everyone’s hand. ‘But just call me Peter.’
‘Peter’s one of our two pilots and expedition leaders,’ Julian explains. ‘He and Nina – ah, here she is!’
A blonde woman with a short haircut and a freckled snub nose climbs out of the lift hatch and joins them. Julian puts an arm around her muscular shoulders. Evelyn screws up her eyes and bets that Nina turns up in Julian’s bedroom from time to time.
‘May I introduce you: Nina Hedegaard from Denmark.’
‘Hey!’ Nina waves to everybody.
‘Same role as Peter: pilot, expedition leader. They will both be by your side over the next two weeks, whenever you’re travelling vast distances. They will show you the most beautiful parts of our satellite, and protect you from weird space creatures such as the Chinese. Apologies, Rebecca – the red Chinese of course!’
With a start, Rebecca Hsu looks up from the display of her phone.
‘I have no network,’ she says pleadingly.
* * *
It’s cramped inside the lift cabin. You have to climb. Six rows of five seats are arranged vertically, connected by a ladder. The luggage has been stowed in the other lift. Evelyn Chambers sits in the same row as Miranda Winter, Finn O’Keefe and the Rogachevs. She leans back and stretches her legs. In terms of comfort, the seats are easily a match for first class in any airline.
‘Ooohh, how nice,’ Miranda says, delighted. ‘A Dane.’
‘You like Denmark?’ Rogachev asks with cool politeness, while Olympiada stares straight ahead.
‘Excuse me!’ Miranda opens her eyes wide. ‘I am a Dane.’
‘You must forgive my ignorance, I work in the steel sector.’
Rogachev’s mouth curls into a smile. ‘Are you an actress?’
‘Hmm. Opinions vary on that one.’ Miranda gives a loud, dirty laugh. ‘What am I, Evelyn?’
‘The entertainment factor?’ Evelyn suggests.
‘Well, okay, I’m actually a model. So I’ve done pretty much everything. Of course I wasn’t always a model, I used to be a salesgirl at the cheese counter, then I was responsible for the fries at McDonald’s, but then I was discovered on this kind of casting show? And then Levi’s took me on straight away. I caused car accidents! I mean, six foot tall, young, pretty, and boobs, genuine boobs, you understand, the real thing – Hollywood was bound to give me a call sooner or later.’
O’Keefe, slouching in his seat, raises an eyebrow. Olympiada Rogacheva seems to have worked out that you can’t deny reality just by looking away.
‘So what kinds of parts have you played?’ she asks flatly.
‘Oh, I had my breakthrough with Criminal Passion, an erotic thriller.’ Miranda gives a sugary smile. ‘I even got a prize, but let’s not go into that.’
‘Why? That’s very— that’s great.’
‘Not really – they gave me the Golden Raspberry for the worst performance.’ Miranda laughs and throws her hands in the air. ‘But hey! Then came comedies, but I didn’t have much luck with that. No hits, so I just started drinking. Bad stuff! For a while I looked like a Danish pastry with raisins for eyes, until one night there I am careening along Mulholland Drive and I go over this homeless guy, my God, poor man!’
‘Terrible.’
‘Yeah, but actually not because, between ourselves, he survived and made a lot of money out of it. Not that I’m trying to whitewash anything! But I swear, that’s what happened, and I had my whole stay in jail filmed from the very first second to the last, they were even able to get into the shower. Prison on prime time! And I was back on top again.’ She sighs. ‘Then I met Louis Burger. Do you know him?’
‘No, I—’
‘Oh, right. You’re from the steel sector, or your husband is, where you don’t know people like that. Although Louis Burger, industrialist, investment magnate—’
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