Frank Schätzing - Limit

What else could go wrong? What in God’s name was he doing wrong?

He wasn’t doing anything wrong. The circumstances were what they were. He had learned a long time ago how it felt to be in the pinball machine of circumstance. To be relentlessly pinged around in it, however clever one saw oneself to be. It was so much harder to gain control over oneself than it was to take it away from others. Plans were constructs, well thought out straight lines. On the drawing board, they functioned excellently. In practice, though, it was about not going off course along the winding road of chance. He knew all of that, so why was he getting worked up?

Fine, so the worst possible scenario was that, apart from Momoka, they had all made it through. He thought he remembered having seen her rover in a crash, but supposing they had managed to heave it onto its wheels again, they still had two vehicles. He, on the other hand, was on foot and robbed of his explosives. Status: critical!

He moved his arm cautiously, stretching it out and bending it. Nothing was broken, nothing dislocated. It was possible that he was concussed. Apart from that, though, he was fine, and he still had the two pistols with conventional bullets, which admittedly made smaller holes, but were just as deadly.

Which direction had he run in? His head-over-heels flight had brought him into uncharted territory. That was bad. Without the beetle tracks, he could end up missing the station. His own tracks were sure to be visible over the not-yet-processed ground, but then the rover hadn’t turned up yet. They might be looking for Momoka, but could they risk letting him get away for her sake? If they really did still have both the rovers, then wouldn’t one of them have started hunting him down by now?

Maybe things weren’t that bad after all. Strengthened by confidence, he turned his attention to working out where he was.

They struggled up one by one, clumsy, dazed, their white spacesuits dirty, as though they were clambering out of their own graves. All around them, it looked like the scene after a bomb attack or a natural catastrophe. The hunchback of the mining machine, still towering up into the skies, now a massif in the regolith. The snapped spider limbs of the loading robot. Their smashed rover. And over everything, a ghost of swirling dust.

‘Momoka?’

They called her name unrelentingly, wandering around in search, but received no answer, nor did they find any trace of her. Momoka seemed to have been swallowed up by the dust, and suddenly Evelyn couldn’t even see the others any more. She stopped. Shuddered as something cold touched her deep within. The dust around her billowed out, forming a kind of tunnel. On the other side it seemed different in nature, darker, more threatening, and at the same time more inviting, and all of a sudden it seemed to Evelyn that she was seeing herself disappear in the tunnel, and with every step that she took away from herself, her silhouette swirled beyond recognition, until she lost herself. An indefinable amount of time later, she found the others on the other side.

‘Where were you?’ asked Julian, concerned. ‘We were calling you the whole time.’

Where had she been? At a border, a border to forgetting. She had glanced momentarily into the shadows; that’s how it had seemed to her at least, as if something were tugging and sucking at her, using its dark temptations to try to make her surrender. She knew about the irrationality of perception. Borderline experiences had been the subject of esoteric debate on her programmes more than once, without she herself having any perception of the other side, but in the moment when Amber, Oleg and Julian turned up by her side again, she had known that Momoka Omura was dead. The silence that met their calls was the silence of death. The only thing they found was tracks, which led away from the head of the beetle and which could only be Hanna’s.

But Momoka had disappeared without a trace.

In the moments that followed, Evelyn didn’t say a word about her unusual experience. After a short time they gave up the search and went back to the rover. It was no longer functional, but at least they managed to salvage their oxygen supplies. For the first time since they had been on Hanna’s trail, it looked as though his tracks were going to lead them the wrong way.

They weighed up their options.

In the end, they decided to keep following him.

Finn O’Keefe closed his eyes. He was no coward. And the absence of other human beings certainly didn’t scare him. He had discovered years ago how calm and agreeable his own company could be, and had experienced many wonderful moments of solitude with nothing above him but the sky and the cries of seagulls riding the salty west winds, scanning the sea for tell-tale signs of glistening backs. The only time he ever experienced loneliness, solitude’s desperate sister, was in crowded places. For this reason, the Moon was completely to his taste, despite having so far failed to have any spiritual effect on him. It was easy to be alone here: all you had to do was go behind a hill, switch yourself off from the radio-wave chatter and pretend the others didn’t even exist.

Now, on the flight to the Peary Base, his self-deception was revealed. It was laughable to think that you could turn your back on the world in the certainty that it was still there, to assume that you could opt back into its incredibly noisy civilisation at any moment. Even in the expanse of the Mojave Desert, in the mountain range of the Himalayas, or in the perpetual ice, you would still be sharing the planet with thinking beings, a thought which gave solitude a comfortable foundation.

But the Moon was lonely .

Banished from Gaia’s protective body, cut off from all communication and from the whole of humanity, it had become clear to him during the two hours they had been en route that Luna placed no value on Homo sapiens . Never before had he felt so ignored and devoid of importance. The hotel, gone to ruin. Peary Base, no longer a certainty. The plateaux and mountain ranges all around them suddenly seemed hostile – no, not even that, because hostility would mean they were acknowledged here. But in the context of what religious people defined as Creation, the human race clearly had less significance than a microbe under a skirting board. If one took Luna to be exemplary of the trillions of galaxies in the visible cosmos, it became clear that all of this had not been made for humans – if it had been made at all.

He suddenly found comfort in the group and was thankful for every word that was spoken. And even though he hadn’t known Miranda Winter that well, her death felt like a personal tragedy, because just a few centimetres would have been enough to prevent it. She might have driven her beloved Louis around the bend, named her breasts, and believed any old nonsense that dried-up old Hollywood divas like Olinda Brannigan deduced from tarot cards and tea leaves; but the way she saw herself, her resolutely cheerful determination not to let anything or anyone destroy her good mood, the sublime in the ridiculous, he had admired all of that about her, and possibly even loved it a little too. He wondered whether he had ever been as honest in his arrogance as Miranda Winter had been in her simplicity.

His gaze wandered over to Lynn Orley.

What had happened to her ?

The living dead. It was as though she had been erased. Nina had mentioned some kind of shock to Deputy Commander Wachowski, but she seemed to be working her way through self-destruction programme; she hadn’t spoken a single word since Miranda’s death. There was hardly anything to indicate that she was even aware of her surroundings. Everything—