Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  He yawned.

  All of a sudden it was as if all the light had been sucked from the streets. The storm front drew over Quyu, releasing streams of pitch-black water. Within seconds rubbish was floating down the road, people were running wildly in all directions, shoulders hunched, as if that were any protection against being completely drenched. The onslaught of a quick succession of violent thunder crashes edged closer. Jericho looked into a sky split by electricity.

  A foretaste of destruction.

  After an hour in which the street turned into a miniature version of the Yangtze and banked-up garbage formed a dinky little model of the Three Gorges Dam, it had passed. As quickly as it had come, the storm moved on. The murky broth drained away, leaving a vista of rubbish and drowned rats against a theatrical background of rising steam. Another hour later a glowing magenta ball had won its battle with the clouds and wasted its fire on streets that were free of tourists. Wong’s World welcomed a throng of pale figures, women peeped from tents and shacks, the stale promise of the night, or positioned themselves, scantily dressed, at the crossroads.

  At around eleven o’clock a young man on the couch next to Jericho groaned, pulled the goggles from his eyes, sat up and vomited a stream of watery puke between his legs. The couch’s self-cleaning systems hummed immediately into action, sucked the stuff away and flooded the surface with disinfectant.

  Jericho asked if he could do anything.

  The boy, who could hardly have been more than sixteen, considered him with a mumbled curse and staggered to the bar. His body was emaciated, his eyes no longer focused on the presence of things. After a while he came back, chewing something, probably barely aware of what exactly it was. Jericho felt compelled to point out that he was dehydrated, and buy him a bottle of water, which the boy would presumably chuck in his face by way of thanks. If anything at all was left in his eyes, it was the smouldering aggression of those who fear the loss of their last illusions.

  The scanners were silent.

  Montes Alpes, The Moon

  South-east of the basin that marked the start of the Vallis Alpina, a row of striking peaks stretched down to the Promontorium Agassiz, a mountainous cape on the edge of the Mare Imbrium. Overall, the formation looked more like the crusts thrown up by terrestrial subduction zones than the ring range normally found on the Moon. It was only from a great altitude that the weird reality was revealed, that the Mare Imbrium, like all maria, was itself a crater of enormous size, produced in the early days of the satellite more than three billion years ago, when its mantle had still been liquid under its hardening surface. Cataclysmic impacts had torn the young crust open. Lava had risen from the interior, flowed into the basins and created those dark basalt plains which led astronomers like Riccioli to conclude the presence of lunar seas. In reality the complete, 250-kilometre alpine chain marked the tenth part of one of those circular ramparts so colossal that giant craters in the format of a Clavius, Copernicus or Ptolemy shrank to mere pockmarks in comparison.

  The mightiest of all these alpine accumulations was Mons Blanc. At a height of three and a half thousand metres, it fell short of its terrestrial counterpart, but that did not detract from its titanic nature. Not only could you see the vast expanse of the south-western Mare Imbrium from its slopes, but once you were up here you felt a bit closer to the stars, almost as if they could suddenly spot you, and greet you appropriately.

  And greet you they did. In fact when Julian, in the sudden and inexplicable hope of seeing the glowing trail of a shooting star, raised his eyes to Cassiopeia, billions of indifferent eyes momentarily switched places to unite in cosmic reproach, forming a single, clearly legible word: IDIOT! Subtext: you don’t get shooting stars without an atmosphere, if anything just asteroids briefly illuminated by sunlight, so please try to think precisely next time!

  Julian paused. Of course the sky formed the word only very briefly, so that it was not noticed by Mimi Parker, Marc Edwards, Eva Borelius or Karla Kramp; nor by Nina Hedegaard, who was leading her little community of mountain-climbers – in so far as the conquest of a few hundred metres of gently sloping terrain justified the term mountain-climbing. Resting not far away was the Callisto, which had brought them the forty kilometres from the hotel to here, just below the peak: a clumsy jet shuttle reminiscent of a vastly inflated bumblebee. Julian knew that generations of future tourists would be disappointed by the design of the moon vehicles. But there was no reason for aerodynamics in a vacuum, unless—

  Unless you decided to design them aerodynamically anyway, for purely aesthetic reasons.

  The thought was enticing, but Julian wasn’t in a mood to be seduced. His thought processes were obstructed by shooting stars, even though he wasn’t really interested in the stupid things. What had made him think of them? Had he thought of them, in fact, or had he been thinking about transient light phenomena in general? Darting through his brain, leaping from the constant particle-flow of his thoughts, expression of a more complex whole. He tracked down the image, pursued it back through the course of the day to the early hours of the morning, condensed it, forced it into certain coordinates, gave it a place in space and time: very early morning, just before leaving his suite, a glimpse, a flash—

  All of a sudden he remembered.

  A flash on the outside left edge of the window that took up the wall of the living room facing the gorge. Something darting from right to left, like a shooting star, but perhaps you just had to be very tired and sleep-deprived not to work out what it really was. And God knows, he had been tired! But Julian’s mind was like a film archive, not a scene went missing. In retrospect he saw that the phenomenon was neither virtual in nature nor a product of his imagination, but was extremely real in origin, which meant that he actually had seen something, on the far side of the valley, level with the magnetic rail tracks, even more or less at the height of the rails, where the tracks curved northwards—

  He had seen the Lunar Express.

  He stopped, dumbfounded.

  ‘—much weirder shapes than we’re used to on Earth,’ Nina Hedegaard was explaining, as she walked towards a basalt structure that looked like a Cubist statue. ‘The reason is that there is no wind to wear away the rock, so nothing erodes. Consequently what is produced—’

  He had seen the train! More of an after-image, but it couldn’t have been anything else, and it had been on the way to Gaia.

  To the hotel.

  ‘Interesting, what every culture has seen in the Moon,’ Eva was saying. ‘Did you know that many Pacific tribes still worship this great lump of rock as a fertility god?’

  ‘A fertility god?’ Hedegaard laughed. ‘The tiniest protozoon wouldn’t survive up here.’

  ‘I’d have put my money on the Sun,’ said Mimi Parker. Her tone contained a certain contempt for all native cultures because their representatives hadn’t come into the world as respectable Christians. ‘The Sun as a giver of life, I mean.’

  ‘In tropical regions it’s hard to see it that way,’ Eva replied. ‘Or in the desert. The sun beats down ruthlessly upon you, twelve months without a break; it scorches harvests, dries up rivers, kills people and animals. But the Moon brings coolness and freshness. The fleeting moisture of the day condenses into dew, you can rest and sleep—’

  ‘With each other,’ Karla finished her sentence.

  ‘Exactly. Amongst the Maoris, for example, the man only had the job of holding the woman’s vagina open with his penis long enough for the moonbeams to penetrate it. It wasn’t the man who got the woman pregnant, it was the Moon.’

  ‘Take a look. The old whore.’

  ‘My God, Karla, how churlish,’ Edwards laughed. ‘I think that’s not incompatible with the idea of immaculate conception.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ Mimi fumed. ‘Perhaps a primitive version of it.’

  ‘Why primitive?’ asked Kramp, waiting to pounce.

  ‘Don’t you think that’s primitive?’

  ‘That the Moon gets women pr
egnant? Yeah. As primitive as the idea that some unholy spirit is poking around on Earth and selling the result as an immaculate conception.’

  ‘There’s no comparison!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because – well, because there just isn’t. One’s a primitive superstition, the other is—’

  ‘I just want to understand.’

  ‘With all due respect, are you seriously doubting—?’

  Hang on. The Lunar Express? Was that the one they’d arrived on? There was a second one, after all, parked at the Pole, which was only to be used if tourist numbers exceeded the capacity of the first. Had somebody arrived on the replacement train, at a quarter past five in the morning?

  And why didn’t he know anything about it?

  Had Hanna seen anything?

  ‘Plato must be behind that somewhere,’ said Edwards, trying to calm things down. ‘Is the curvature too big?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Nina. ‘You’d be able to make out the top edge of the crater from here, except that the flank facing us is in shadow at the moment. Black against black. But if you turn round, you can make out the Vallis Alpina to the north-east.’

  ‘Oh, yes! Fantastic.’

  ‘It’s pretty long,’ said Mimi.

  ‘A hundred and thirty-four kilometres. Half a Grand Canyon. Come over this way a bit. Up here. Take a look.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Follow my outstretched finger. That bright dot.’

  ‘Hey! That couldn’t possibly be—?’

  ‘Certainly is,’ cried Marc. ‘Our hotel!’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘There.’

  ‘To be perfectly honest, I can see nothing but sun and shade.’

  ‘No, there’s something there!’

  A babble of words, a confusion of thoughts. It could only have been the second train. On closer reflection, hardly surprising. Lynn and Dana Lawrence were taking care of everything. The hotel was their domain. What did he know? Food, oxygen and fuel had arrived during the night. He was a guest like all the others, he could consider himself lucky that everything was working so smoothly. Be proud! Be proud of Lynn, whatever dire predictions Tim had been gloomily coming up with. Ridiculous, that boy! Did someone stressed build hotels like Gaia?

  Or was Lynn another reflection on his retina, whose true nature escaped him?

  Unbelievable! Now he was starting to do the same thing himself.

  ‘Julian?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I suggested that we fly back.’ Nina’s sweet conspiratorial smile behind her helmet could be heard in every word. ‘Marc and Mimi want to get to the tennis court before dinner, and apart from that we’ll have plenty of time to freshen up.’

  Freshen up. Cute code-words. His right hand rose mechanically to stroke his beard, and instead rubbed against the bottom edge of his visor.

  ‘Yes, of course. Let’s go.’

  * * *

  ‘Maybe you’ve seen me in more spectacular settings before. And thought they were real, even though your rational mind told you it couldn’t all be real. But then that’s the illusionist’s job, tricking your reason. And believe me, modern technology can produce any kind of illusion.’

  Finn O’Keefe spread his arms as he walked slowly on.

  ‘But illusions can’t produce emotions of the kind that I’m feeling right now. Because what you’re seeing here isn’t a trick! It’s by some way the most exciting place I’ve ever been, far more spectacular than any film.’

  He stopped and turned towards the camera, with the radiant Gaia in the background.

  ‘Before, when you wanted to fly to the Moon, you had to sit in a cinema seat. Today you can experience what I’m experiencing. You can see the Earth, set in such a wonderful starry sky, as if you were seeing all the way to the edge of the universe. I could spend hours trying to describe my feelings to you, but I,’ he smiled, ‘am only Perry Rhodan. So let me express myself in the words of Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to set foot on the satellite, in February 1971: Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realise this is Earth … home. A sight that changed me for ever.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lynn exclaimed. ‘That was great!’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Finn shook his head. The banal realisation dawned on him that shaking your head in a spacesuit doesn’t communicate anything to anybody, because your helmet doesn’t shake with it. Peter Black checked the result on the display of his film camera. O’Keefe’s face was clearly recognisable through his closed visor. He had taken off the gold metallised UV filter, as the surroundings would otherwise have been reflected in it. In spite of his layered contact lenses he wouldn’t be able to walk around in the open for very long. And it certainly wasn’t a good idea to look into the Sun.

  ‘No, it’s great,’ Black agreed.

  ‘I think the quote’s too long,’ said Finn. ‘Far too long. A real sermon – I nearly dozed off.’

  ‘It’s sacred.’

  ‘No, it’s just too long, that’s all.’

  ‘We’ll cut in shots of the Earth,’ said Lynn. ‘But if you like we’ll do an alternative shot. There’s another quote from James Lovell: People on Earth don’t understand what they have. Maybe because not many of them have the opportunity to leave it and then come back.’

  ‘Lovell won’t do,’ said Black. ‘He never set foot on the Moon.’

  ‘Is that so important?’ asked O’Keefe.

  ‘Yes, and there’s another reason why not. He was the commander of Apollo 13. Anybody remember? Houston, we have a problem. Lovell and his people nearly snuffed it.’

  ‘Didn’t Cernan say something clever?’ Lynn asked. ‘He was a pretty good talker.’

  ‘Nothing comes to mind.’

  ‘Armstrong?’

  ‘It’s one small step for—’

  ‘Forget it. Aldrin?’

  Black thought for a moment. ‘Yeah, something short too. He who has been to the Moon has no more goals on Earth.’

  ‘That sounds a bit fatalistic,’ Finn complained.

  ‘What happened to the monkeys?’ Heidrun’s voice joined in. O’Keefe saw her coming down the hill in front of Shepard’s Green. Even faceless and armoured her elfin figure was unmistakable.

  ‘What monkeys?’ Lynn’s laugh was slightly too shrill.

  ‘Didn’t you send monkeys up at some point? What did they say?’

  ‘I think they spoke Russian,’ said Black.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ O’Keefe grinned. ‘Don’t you fancy golf?’

  ‘I’ve never fancied golf,’ Heidrun announced. ‘I just wanted to watch Walo falling in the dirt as he took his swing.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  ‘He knows. Didn’t you boast about beating me at swimming, big-mouth? You’d have the opportunity.’

  ‘What, now?’

  Instead of answering, she waved to him and skipped away on her gazelle-like legs.

  ‘We’ve got filming to do,’ he called after her; it was as superfluous as his head-shaking, since radio contact remained constant only while visual contact was maintained.

  ‘Dinner’s on me if you win,’ she whispered, a small, white snake in his ear. ‘Schnitzel and röstis.’

  ‘Hey, Finn?’ said Lynn.

  ‘Mm-hm?’

  ‘I think that’s a wrap.’ Was he wrong, or did she sound nervous? Throughout the whole shoot she’d had a tense expression on her face. ‘I think the Mitchell quote is fine.’

  O’Keefe saw Heidrun setting off along the other side of the gorge.

  ‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Me too, as a matter of fact.’

  * * *

  Nina Hedegaard was freshening herself up, and freshening Julian up as well. He lay on his
back as she guided him like a joystick. He didn’t have to do much more than put his arms around her buttocks and contract his own from time to time, to establish counter-pressure – at least that was normally how things worked, but at the moment her soft, tanned, golden body weighed only nine and a half kilos, and threatened to bounce away whenever he thrust too enthusiastically. On the Moon, taking possession of strategically crucial millimetres called for basic knowledge of applied mechanics: where exactly to grip, what contribution the muscles had to make – biceps, triceps, pectoralis major – holding the hip bones like a hinge, drawing them to him, pushing them away at a precisely calculated angle, then bringing them back down … It was all frustratingly complicated. They managed to crack the problem at one point, but Julian didn’t feel entirely comfortable. As Hedegaard slowly writhed her way towards a G-spot tornado measuring 5 on the Fujita scale, he was lost in idiotic thoughts, like the consequences of sex on the Moon if a few meddlesome beams in New Zealand had been enough to make little Maoris. Could they expect decuplets? Would Nina squat like a termite queen in the rocky seclusion of the Gaia Hotel, her abdomen monstrously swollen, popping out a human child every four seconds, or would she simply burst?

  He stared at her glimmering, carefully trimmed, downy thicket and saw tiny trains driving through it, glittering reflections on spun gold, while his own Lunar Express valiantly stoked the engine. Hedegaard started moaning in Danish, usually a good sign, except that today it sounded somehow cryptic to his ears, as if he were to be sacrificed on the altar of her desire, to bring a Julian or a Juliana into the world as quickly as possible, a future Master or Miss Orley, and he started feeling uneasy. She was twenty-eight years younger than him. He hadn’t asked her for ages what she expected from all this, not least because in the few private moments that they enjoyed together he hadn’t had time to ask any questions, so quickly had they leapt out of their clothes, but eventually he would have to ask her. Above all he would have to ask himself. Which was much worse, because he already knew the answer, and it wasn’t that of a sixty-year-old man.

  He tried to hold out, then he reached his orgasm.