Frank Schätzing - Limit

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 pregnant? 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.