Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘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. O
h, 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:

  But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

  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.