Frank Schätzing - Limit

Tim chewed his bottom lip. Then he shrugged. Lynn walked past them, followed by the Tautous and the Donoghues. She winked at them, lowered her voice and said behind her hand, ‘Hey, insider knowledge. This is confidential information for family members only. Row eight, seats thirty-two and thirty-three. Best view.’

‘Got it. Over and out.’

Amber linked arms with the group and disappeared without another word towards the auditorium. Tim sauntered along behind her. Someone drew up beside him.

‘You’re Julian’s son, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lovely to meet you. Heidrun Ögi. Your family’s completely bonkers. I mean, it’s not a problem, it’s absolutely fine,’ she added when he failed to reply. ‘I love people with bees in their bonnets. You’re far more interesting than the common run of people.’

Tim stared at her. He would have expected anything from this chalk-white woman with the violet eyes and the white mane of hair: Celtic magic spells, extraterrestrial dialects, just not that kind of misplaced remark.

‘Really?’ he managed.

‘So what sort of madman are you, then? If you take after Julian.’

‘You think my father’s mad?’

‘Of course, he’s a genius. So he must be mad.’

Tim said nothing. What kind of madman are you, then? Good question. No, he thought, what an idiotic assumption! I’m definitely the only one in the family who isn’t mad.

‘Well—’

‘See you.’ Heidrun smiled, drew away from him, waving her fingertips, and followed the jovial Swiss chap who was clearly her husband. Slightly startled, he pushed his way to the middle of the eighth row and slumped down next to Amber.

‘Who are these Ögis?’ he asked.

She looked over her shoulder. ‘The guy with the albino wife?’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Glittering couple. He runs a company called Swiss Performance. They’re involved in all kinds of areas, but mostly he’s in the construction business. I think he came up with the first pontoon estates for the flooded areas of Holland. At the moment he’s in discussions with Albert over Monaco Two.’

‘Monaco Two?’

‘Yes, just imagine! A huge floating island. It was on the news a while ago. The thing’s only going to cruise in fair-weather zones.’

‘Ögi must be the same sort of bonkers as Julian.’

‘Could be. He’s said to be a philanthropist. He supports needy artists, performers and circus folk, he’s started up educational institutions for underprivileged young people, he sponsors museums, he donates money like it was going out of fashion. Last year he donated a considerable part of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.’

‘How the hell do you know all this?’

‘You should read the gossip sheets more often.’

‘Don’t need to while I’ve got you. And Heidrun?’

‘Yeah…’ Amber smiled knowingly. ‘That’s where things get interesting! Ögi’s family isn’t exactly over the moon about their relationship.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘She’s a photographer. She’s talented. She takes pictures of celebrities and ordinary people. She’s published picture-books about the, erm… red-light scene. In her wild years she’s said to have gone so far off the rails that she was thrown out of her house and disinherited. After that she started funding her studies by working as a stripper, and later as an actress in posh porn films. At the start of the millennium she became a cult figure in Switzerland’s smart set. I mean, you couldn’t exactly claim she’s not striking.’

‘Good God, no.’

‘Eyes straight ahead, Timmy. She gave up the porn films after her studies, but went on stripping. At parties, gallery openings, just for fun. At one of those events she came across Walo, and he helped boost her career as a photographer.’

‘Which is why she married him.’

‘Apparently she isn’t an opportunist.’

‘Touching,’ said Tim, and was about to add something else when the lights went out. They were immediately sitting in inky blackness. A solo violin started playing. Gentle music wove threads through the dark, shimmering lines that formed elaborate structures. At the same time the space assumed a blue glow, a mysterious, gloomy ocean. From what seemed to be a long distance away – the impressive result of holographic projections on the huge, concave glass wall – something came towards them, pulsating and transparent, something that looked like an organic spaceship with a vague nucleus of alien, shadowy passengers.

‘Life,’ said a voice, ‘began in the sea.’

Tim turned his head. Amber’s profile shone like a ghost in the blue light. Enchanted, she watched the cell growing bigger and slowly beginning to rotate. The voice spoke of primal lakes and chemical marriages contracted many years ago. The lonely cell in the infinity of blue divided, and then that division became faster and faster, more and more cells came into being, and all of a sudden something long and serpentine came wriggling towards them.

‘Six hundred million years ago, the age of complex, multicellular living creatures began!’ the voice announced.

Over the minutes that followed, a speeded-up version of evolution occurred. The realism was so overwhelming that Tim flinched involuntarily when a monster a metre long, with shredder teeth and thorny claws, catapulted towards him, switched direction with a flick of its powerful tail and devoured not him, but a twitching trilobite. The Cambrian age emerged and faded before his eyes, followed by the Ordovician, the Silurian and the Devonian. As if someone had pressed a search button on a geological remote control, life swarmed through the blue and underwent every imaginable metamorphosis. Jellyfish, worms, lancelets and crabs, giant scorpions, octopuses, sharks and reptiles appeared in turn, an amphibian turned into a saurian, everything moved onto land, a radiant, cloud-scattered sky took the place of the depths of the sea, the Mesozoic sun shone down on hadrosaurs, brachiosaurs, tyrannosaurs and raptors, until a huge meteorite came crashing down on the horizon and set off a wave of destruction that swept all life away. In digital perfection the inferno charged onwards, taking the audience’s breath away, but when the dust settled it revealed the victory parade of the mammals, and everyone was still sitting unscathed in their rows of seats. Something ape-like swung through a summery green grove, stood upright, turned into a chattering early hominid, armed and clothed itself, changed its build, posture and physiognomy, rode a horse, drove a car, piloted an aeroplane, floated waving through the interior of a space station and out through an opening – but instead of landing in space, it stretched and dived back into the waters of the ocean. Diffuse blue, once again. The human, floating in it, smiled, and they all smiled back.

‘They say we are attracted to water because we come from water and we ourselves are over seventy per cent water. But did we originate only in the sea?’

The blue condensed into a sphere and shrank to a tiny drop of water in a black void.

‘If we go in search of our origins, we have to look a long way back into the past. Because water, which covers over two-thirds of the Earth, and which we are made of ’ – the voice paused significantly – ‘came from space!’

Silence.

To the deafening sound of an orchestra the droplet exploded into millions of glittering particles, and suddenly everything was full of galaxies, lined up like dewdrops on the threads of a spider’s web. As if they were sitting in a spaceship, they approached a single galaxy, flew into it, passed a sun and floated on, towards its third planet, until it hung before them as a fiery sphere, covered with an ocean of boiling lava. Asteroids crashed noisily in as the voice explained how the water had come to Earth on meteorites from the depths of space, bringing organic matter with it. They watched a second ocean of steam settling over the sea of lava. The whole thing reached a climax when a huge planetoid came dashing by, slightly smaller than the young Earth and bearing the name of Theia. The magma chamber shook with the impact, debris flew in all directions, and the Earth survived that too, now richer in mass and water and in possession of a moon that formed from the debris and sped around the planet. The hail of projectiles eased, oceans and continents came into being.