Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Excuse me?’ Keowa cocked her head. ‘You can’t be serious?’

‘I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just want you to look at the situation as though it were an equation, look at all the variables, without fear or favour. Can you do that?’

Keowa considered this. Palstein had drawn her into a strange kind of conversation here. She had set out to interview him, and analyse him, and now the tables were turned.

‘I believe so,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘There is no ideal state of things. But there are approximations. Some of them have been hard-won. When we abolished slavery, the idea of the free citizen won out, at all levels of society. The citizen of a democratic state is bound by the laws but fundamentally free, isn’t that right?’

‘ D’accord .’

‘But if you’re a member of a company, you’re property. That’s the change that’s happening all over.’

‘Also right.’

‘It seems to me about as difficult to break out of this pattern as it would be to suspend the laws of nature. The freedom of the individual is nothing but an idea by now. We live on a globe, and globes are closed systems, they offer no chance of escape and the globe is all divided up. At this very moment, while we sit here on this beautiful lake talking the whole thing through, the Moon in its orbit is being divided up, way over our heads, that’s the next globe. There’s no such thing as uncommercialised space any more.’

‘That is so.’

‘Well, excuse me, Gerald, yes, I’m a realist – but I’ll fight this to the very end!’

‘That’s your prerogative. I can understand your position, but please, think about it. You can hate the very thought of being property. Or you can make some kind of compromise with it.’ Palstein ran a rope through his fingers and laughed. All of a sudden he seemed very relaxed, a Buddha at rest. ‘And perhaps compromise is the better choice.’

The sun was losing mass.

Every minute, sixty million tonnes of material in its mantle was lost, protons, electrons, helium atoms and a few other elements with walk-on roles, the ingredients for that mysterious molecular cloud that supposedly gave birth to all the celestial bodies in our system. The solar wind streamed ceaselessly outward, blowing comets off course, fluorescing in the Earth’s atmosphere as the aurorae borealis and australis, sweeping away the accretions of gas in interplanetary space and gusting out, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, to the Oort cloud. Cosmic background radiation joined the mix, weak but omnipresent, a newsfeed at the speed of light, speaking of supernovae, neutron stars, black holes and the birth of the universe.

Ever since the Earth had collided with a proto-planet named Theia and given birth to the Moon, its satellite had been defenceless against all these influences, exposed. The sun’s breath blew constantly over the lunar surface. It had no magnetic field to deflect the high-energy particles, and although they only penetrated a few micrometres deep, the lunar dust was saturated with them, and four and a half billion years of meteorite bombardment had turned the whole surface over and over like a ploughed field. Since its creation, the Moon had soaked up so much solar plasma that it held enough to bring mankind up here, hungry for resources, armed with spaceships and mining machinery to rip away the Moon’s dowry.

Sometimes there were sunstorms.

Spots formed on the sun’s surface, huge arcs of plasma leapt across the raging ocean of fire, hurling umpteen times the usual amount of radiation out into space, and the solar wind became a hurricane, howling through the solar system at twice its usual speed. When this happened, astronauts were well advised to huddle in their habitation modules and not, if at all possible, to be caught in a travelling spaceship. Each ionised particle that passed through a human cell damaged the genetic material irreparably. Every twelve years the solar hurricanes were more frequent: as recently as 2024 they had stopped shuttle traffic for a while and forced the residents at the moon bases underground. Even machines did not cope well with these particle storms, which damaged their outer skin and wiped the data stored in their microchips, caused short-circuits and unwanted chain reactions.

Everyone agreed that sunstorms were the biggest danger of manned space flight.

On 26 May 2025, the sun was breathing calmly and evenly.

As usual, its breath streamed out into the heliosphere, passed Mercury, mingled with the carbon dioxide on Venus and Mars and with the Earth’s atmosphere, blew straight through the gaseous shells of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, washed up on the shores of all their moons and of course reached the Earth’s satellite as well, each particle travelling at 400 kilometres per second. The particles ploughed into the regolith, clinging to the grey dust, spread out across the plains and the crater walls, and a few billions also collided with the female colossus at the edge of the Vallis Alpina in the lunar north, without penetrating her skin, at least in the parts reinforced with mooncrete. Gaia sat there on her cliff edge, unmoved by the cosmic hailstorm, her eyeless face turned towards the Earth.

Julian’s woman in the Moon.

Lynn’s nightmare.

The stranded ocean liner clinging to the volcanic slopes of the Isla de las Estrellas, the OSS Grand, both of these were products of her imagination. Gaia, though, was from a dream that Julian had had, in which he saw his daughter sitting on the Moon, none other, a figure all of light in front of the black brocade of space sewn with its millions of stars. Typically for him, he saw Lynn exaggerated to the scale of a metaphor, an ideal of humanity, journeying onward, wise and pure, and he woke up and called her there and then from bed and told her about his dream. And of course Lynn enthusiastically took up the idea of a hotel shaped like the human form, congratulated her father and promised to draw up preliminary designs right away, while this sublime vision that was supposed to be her actually turned her stomach so much that she couldn’t sleep for a week. Her eating disorders reached a whole new anorexic level, and she began to gobble down little green tablets to help her master her fear of failure, but somehow she managed to place the colossus at the edge of the Vallis Alpina, a giant of a woman, named after Mother Earth in ancient Greek myth.

Gaia.

And she had built this woman! The very last of her energy might have burnt away in the fury of creation, but in return, she could claim a masterpiece. At least, everybody told her that’s what it was. She felt no such certainty. The way Julian saw things, she was supposed to recover by working on Gaia; he thought that the project would be a therapy, a countermeasure for the last symptoms of that fearful illness she had just recovered from. He had barely had a clue what the illness was – about as much as if she’d been abducted by aliens and taken to some far-off planet. It was also typical that Julian had convinced himself she was ill because she was short on challenges, stifled by routine, that too much of the same old thing had made her quick blood sluggish. Lynn had been the perfect leader of Orley Travel, the group’s tourism arm, for years now. Perhaps she was yearning for something exciting, something new. Perhaps she was understimulated. She made the world run on time, but was the world enough? Back in the late 2010s private sub-orbital spaceflight had been part of the portfolio of Orley Space, along with tourist trips to the OSS and to the smaller orbital hotels, but strictly speaking, all these things were tourism as well.