Frank Schätzing - Limit

Sobbing, she ran into the living room, forgot the lesser gravity for a moment, slammed straight into the wall and fell on her back. Helpfully, she ended up where she had wanted to be anyway, even if not quite like this, but what the hell. There it was, the minibar, right in front of her nose. Cola, water, juice, everything out, there had to be a bottle of red wine here somewhere, or even better the whisky, the little emergency ration that she had smuggled in, even though you weren’t supposed to drink alcohol up on the Moon, blah blah blah, get it down, neck it—

The bourbon burned her throat as it went down. She crept back to the bathroom on all fours as her ribcage quivered from the coming eruption. She just made it to the toilet, clutched the sides of the bowl and spewed out a jet of whisky, tablets and whatever else was in her stomach. The vomit splattered against the ceramic in front of her, and some of it splashed back onto her face. Where were the tablets? A sour stench assailed her nose, brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t see anything. She retched again, although there was nothing left to bring up, until at last she could wrench herself away from the toilet bowl and collapse beside it. Whimpering, motionless, she lay there bathed in sweat and vomit, staring at the ceiling – and all at once she could breathe again.

Tim. ISLAND-II had said that she should talk to Tim. Where was he? At dinner? Had they already started? It’s twenty past eight, you silly cow, of course they’ve started, a quick hello from the kitchen staff, fripperies of foam and essence and whatever damn thing those fools served up; anything she ate would come straight up again, but she had to go there, she couldn’t stay lying here for ever could she, somebody would come and break the door down.

Fear is a physical phenomenon.

Oh how true, you clever-clogs machine, you Socrates!

All these physical symptoms together make you give your thoughts such weight, Lynn, that’s why they have such horrible power over you.

She sat up carefully. Something buzzed and boomed inside her skull. She felt as though she had lain in the baking Sahara sun for a year, but she could still think straight, and her nerves slowly settled back down from the hideous shock that had set them thrumming. She climbed to her feet like an old woman, and looked at herself in the mirror.

‘God, you look like shit,’ she murmured.

As soon as you manage to relax you’ll be able to break the spiral. The more intensely you feel yourself, the less power your thoughts have to torture you.

Well then. They’d just have to eat the first course without her. What she saw in the mirror there couldn’t be fixed with just a bit of blusher. She would have to retouch, for sure, but she’d be able to do that too. Then she would turn up in the Selene just in time for the main course, glowing and beautiful, the queen of concealment.

A succubus dressed as an angel.

Tu insisted on an evening’s entertainment once he had shot off messages to all and sundry, hoping to get some inside information about the Zheng Group. Some of the people he wrote to were already lying in their beds in Shanghai or Beijing at this time of day, while others were in America – these he either spoke with, or he left a message asking them to call him back. He quipped that at the end of the day, any information he could get about Zheng from America was going to be better than anything from China.

‘Why’s that?’ Jericho asked, as they were served their Wiener schnitzel in the legendary Restaurant Borchardt.

‘Why?’ Tu raised his eyebrows. ‘America is our best friend!’

‘That’s right,’ Yoyo said. ‘Whenever we Chinese want to know anything about China, we ask America.’

‘Fine friends you have,’ Jericho remarked. ‘That friendship of yours makes the rest of the world quake in their boots.’

‘Oh, Owen, come on now. Really.’

‘Seriously! Didn’t you say yourself that the Moon crisis was as bad as the Cuban crisis?’

Tu lifted up his schnitzel with his knife where it spilled over the edge of the plate, and peered doubtfully underneath, as though perhaps he might find something there to explain why Europeans didn’t cut their meat into bite-sized morsels like civilised folk. He would rather have gone to a Chinese restaurant, but he had given way in the face of a dual chorus of ‘You cannot be serious!’

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘And I was as worried sick about it as you were. But you just have to remember that China and America simply can’t go to war. They are the twin giants of the global economy, and they might be at odds but they’re joined at the hip. Traditionally, arch-enemies have always done the best deals, there are advantages to not actually liking the guy you’re doing business with. If you like your trading partner, deals are guaranteed to go wobbly, but antipathy puts you on your guard. That’s why China does so extraordinarily well when it trades with the nations it likes least of all, meaning the USA and Japan. Of course, if I wanted to know something about America, naturally I would get in touch with the Zhong Chan Er Bu.’

‘That’s all a heap of platitudes.’ Jericho began to eat. ‘The idea that the citizens of totalitarian regimes can find out most about themselves if they ask the people whose job it is to spy on them. We’re talking about something else. Even the Americans can’t peer into Zheng Pang-Wang’s mind.’

‘True. It’s still worth asking the CIA and the NSA though, if you want to know something about him. Or for my money you could ask the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the SIS, or the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or Mossad or the Indian Secret Service. You’re a detective, Owen, you believe in infiltration. So do they. Anyway, experience has shown by now that it’s easier to infiltrate a government than a company.’ Tu squeezed some lemon onto his schnitzel, though from the look on his face he seemed worried it might jump from the plate and run out of the door. ‘You said earlier that Orley Enterprises and the USA are the same thing in the end. They are. But only to the extent that Orley can set the conditions for American space flight. Of course, they don’t like that. They hate the idea, but the truth is that the USA is totally dependent on Orley. Their space programme and their whole energy plan is drip-fed from the world’s biggest tech company; it’s plugged in to Julian Orley’s money and his boffins’ know-how. To that extent, Orley might be the same thing as American space-flight, but Washington’s a long way from being the same as Orley. Even if you knew everything about what the American government was planning, you still wouldn’t have much idea about Orley Enterprises. That corporation’s a fortress. It’s a parallel universe. It’s a state in its own right. Extraterritorial.’

‘And Zheng?’

‘Well, that’s different. American presidents may have been in hock to the oil lobby, or the steel barons or the military-industrial complex, but they were never totally identical. Even if that’s just because the big corporations are by definition private in democratic countries. It’s different in China – historically, they’re rooted in the State, but they do what they like.’

‘Are you telling me that the Party has lost power to the corporations?’ Jericho asked. ‘I’d be surprised to hear that.’

‘Rubbish.’ Yoyo shook her head. ‘Losing power implies that somebody has shoved you aside and now rules in your place. But you’re still there, for all that maybe you’re sitting in opposition. But nobody shoved anybody aside in China, it was more like a one-hundred-per-cent transformation, a metamorphosis. Every old communist who kicked the bucket made room for some bright young thing with a Party membership book in his pocket and a chair on the board of a profit-making company.’