Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘So who says we have to concentrate on the complex? The police are doing that. I want us to concentrate on the crowd in the square.’

‘You mean the guy who did it went from there into the building?’

‘I mean that you’re a bit of a male chauvinist. It could have been a girl, couldn’t it?’

‘A killer chick, huh?’ giggled the intern.

‘Carry on like that and you’ll meet one in person. Look at every individual figure in the square. I want to know if anyone filmed the building before, during and after the attack.’

‘Oh, God! This is slave labour!’

‘Stop whining. Jump to it. I’ll take care of Youtube, Facebook, Smallworld and so on.’

After the intern had started viewing the material, she had set about compiling a list of all significant decisions that Palstein had made or advocated over the past six months. She also recorded his resistance to the interests of others. She logged on to forums and blogs, followed the internet debate about closures, acquiescence on the one hand, helpless rage on the other, along with the desire to give the oilmen a good kicking, ideally to put them up against the wall right away, but none of these entries raised a suspicion that its author was in any way connected with the attack. The people involved in open-cast mining were bitter about it, but glad that it was coming to an end, particularly in the Indian communities. It struck her that the Chinese had been taking a great interest in Canadian oil sand over the past two decades, and had put a lot of money into open-cast mining, which they were now losing, and that regardless of the helium-3 revolution they were still, albeit to a waning degree, dependent on oil and gas. On the other hand there was now so much cheap oil available that anything else seemed more sensible than extracting it in the most unprofitable way imaginable. When, in the early hours of the morning, she finally found no more press information and no more postings, she compiled a file about Orley Enterprises, or more precisely about Palstein’s attempts to become involved with Orley Energy and Orley Space.

And suddenly she had an idea.

Dog-tired, she set about backing up her newly fledged theory with arguments. They weren’t particularly new: someone was trying to undermine Palstein’s involvement with Orley. Except that she suddenly realised, clear as day, that the purpose of the attack had been to keep Palstein from travelling to the Moon.

If that was so—

But why? What would Palstein have had to discuss with Julian Orley on the Moon that they couldn’t have sorted out on Earth? Or did it have something to do with other people he was supposed to meet there?

She needed the list of participants.

Her eyes stung. Palstein wasn’t supposed to fly to the Moon. The thought stayed with her. It continued in confused dreams, the kind you get when you fall asleep in office chairs, it produced visions in her alarmingly cracked brain, of people in spacesuits shooting at each other from designer buildings, with her caught in the middle.

‘Hey, Loreena.’

‘Mies is very popular on the Moon,’ she mumbled.

‘Meeces? Love ’em to pieces.’ Someone laughed. She’d been talking nonsense. Blinking and stiff-limbed, she came to. The intern was leaning on the edge of the desk and looked as pleased as punch.

‘Shit,’ she murmured. ‘I dozed off.’

‘Yeah, you look like a slaughtered animal. All that’s missing is the knife-handle sticking out of your chest. Come on, Pocahontas, get a cup of coffee down you. We’ve got something! I think we’ve really got something!’

At around one o’clock, Jericho had had his fourth phone conversation with Zhao, who was at that instant watching a mass brawl and assured him that he was enjoying himself enormously.

Net-junkies came and went. Some made the move to the honeycomb sleeping modules. Almost the entire population of the Cyber Planet was male – women were a vanishingly small minority and most of them were pretty long in the tooth. For Jericho, the only halfway healthy-looking people were the users of the full-motion suits and the treadmills, who were forced to take a bit of exercise as they explored virtual universes. Many of them spent their time in parallel worlds like Second Life and Future Earth, or in the Evolutionarium, where they could pretend to be animals, from dinosaurs all the way down to bacteria. Some of the reclining figures moved their sensor-covered hands, drew cryptic patterns in the empty air, a clue that they were attempting to play an active part in something or other. The overwhelming majority didn’t lift a finger. They had reached the terminal stage, reduced to being observers of their own extended agonies.

Strangely, the atmosphere had a cathartic effect on Jericho, in which Zhao’s defamations melted away to nothing. The net zombies seemed to stir themselves, letting him know it just took an insignificant effort of will to end the status of his loneliness; they pointed at him with desiccated fingers, accused him of flirting with sadness, of having walled himself up in the past and brought about his own misery; they sent him back to life which, so far, hadn’t been nearly as bad as he thought. He made a thousand resolutions, soap-bubbles on whose surfaces the future iridesced. In a strange way the Cyber Planet brought him comfort. Then, as if on cue, Zhao called, claiming he just wanted to know how Jericho was getting on.

He was getting on just fine, Jericho replied.

And again he waited. Even though he had plenty of experience of staring stoically at a single spot, the comings and goings in the market were starting to bore him. People ate and drank, haggled, hung around, hooked up, laughed or got into arguments. The night belonged to the gangsters, it was here that they brought the day’s bounty back into the cycle of greed, albeit quite peacefully. He started to envy Zhao his punch-up, decided to rely entirely on the scanners for a while, connected the hologoggles up to his phone and logged in to Second Life. The market vanished, making way for a boulevard with bistros, shops and a cinema. Using his phone’s touchscreen, Jericho guided his avatar down the street. In this world he was dark-skinned, he had long, black hair and he was called Juan Narciso Ucañan, a name he’d read years ago in some disaster novel or other. Three good-looking young women were sitting at a table in the sun, all with transparent wings and filigree antennae above their eyes.

‘Hi,’ he said to one of them.

She looked up and beamed at him. Jericho’s avatar was a masterpiece of programming, and even by the high standards of Second Life, unusually attractive.

‘My name’s Juan,’ he said. ‘I’m new here.’

‘Inara,’ she said. ‘Inara Gold.’

‘You’re looking great, Inara. Do you fancy a totally awesome experience?’

The avatar that called itself Inara hesitated. That hesitation was typical of the woman hiding behind it. ‘I’m here with my girlfriends,’ she said evasively.

‘Well, I’d love to,’ said one of them.

‘Me too,’ laughed the other one.

‘Okay, let’s the four of us all do something.’ Jericho Juan put on a wide smile. ‘But first I need to discuss something with the most beautiful one. Inara.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I’ve got a surprise for you.’ He pointed to an empty chair. ‘Can I sit down here?’

She nodded. Her big, golden eyes looked at him steadily. He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

‘Could we be undisturbed for a moment, beautiful Inara? Just the two of us?’

‘It’s not up to me, sweetie.’

‘We’re just going anyway,’ one of the girlfriends said and got to her feet. The other sent a snake-tongue darting from between her teeth, fished an insect out of the air, swallowed it and gave an offended hiss. They both spread their wings and disappeared behind a puff of pink clouds. Inara struck a pose and stretched her ribcage. The fabric of the tight top she was wearing started to become transparent.