Frank Schätzing - Limit

And so Julian decided that it was not Orley Space that was to be entrusted with the greatest adventure in the whole history of hotel-building, but his daughter.

The whole gigantic project was made rather simpler by engineering freedoms, given that everything on the Moon weighed only one-sixth of its weight on Earth. What made it harder was that nobody had any experience at all in lunar high-rise construction. Large parts of the American moon base were underground, the rest was as low-rise as you could get. China had done away completely with the idea of having a site, and its outposts were housed in modular vehicles, built like tanks, that followed along not far behind the mining vehicles by their extraction site. Down at the lunar South Pole, not far from Aitken Crater, a small German moon base shared its little place in the sun with an equivalent French station, each housing two astronauts, while over in the Oceanus Procellarum a lively little automated gizmo surveyed the ideal spot for a Russian base that would never be built. The Mare Serenitatis was home to an inquisitive Indian robot, and Japan had a forlorn uninhabited zone around the corner. Otherwise there was nothing else on the Moon for architectural sightseers. Nevertheless the elevated maglev rails proved that in lunar gravity it was possible to build vaulting filigree frameworks that would have long ago collapsed under their own weight back on Earth.

And Gaia had to be big. This was no bed-and-breakfast operation but a monument to the glory of mankind – and of course a stopover for up to two hundred of the most solvent members of that species.

Lynn had obediently drummed up designers and engineers, and set the plans in motion under the strictest secrecy. It soon became clear that a standing figure would be too tall. So she sketched Gaia seated as an alternative, which met with Julian’s especial approval since that was just the way he had dreamed of his hotel. Since there was no question of a detailed depiction of a human body, the first thing the planning team did was fuse the legs together into one massive complex, as though the woman were wearing a narrow skirt that tailed off into a point. The buttocks and thighs were the horizontal base of the building, then below the knee the legs bent downward into the chasm without touching the wall behind them. The daring ambition of this piece of structural engineering was enough in itself to send Lynn clutching the sides of the toilet bowl, where she threw up, half-digested, most of what little food she had been able to choke down. Her tablet consumption rose to compensate, but Julian was in raptures, and the technical team said it could be done.

No need to emphasise that ‘it can be done’ was Julian’s favourite phrase.

Thus the feminine attributes of the building all had to be shown in the torso, basically a high-rise with curved walls rather than straight. It was given a waist, and then lines suggesting a bosom – which was the cause of a great deal of argument. The draughtsmen, being men, drew breasts that were far too large. Lynn declared that she was not interested in tackling the engineering aspects of porn-star-sized boobies just so as to be able to accommodate a few more guests, and she brushed them out of the picture. Suddenly she found the whole idea of a putting a woman on the Moon a hideous platitude. Julian threw in a remark that making the upper body too narrow made the building look like a man, and wasn’t it about time to let a woman represent mankind? One of the architects hinted that Lynn might be a prude. Lynn was enraged. She was no flat-chested goody-goody herself, she yelled, but what exactly was Gaia supposed to embody here? A monument to mammaries? Bust expansion? All right then, said Julian, we want curves. No, Lynn retorted, we want as boyish a figure as we can create. But nothing androgynous, protested the head of the team responsible for the façade. Nothing top-heavy either, Lynn insisted. All right then, suggested Julian, decently curved, which sounded like the best solution, but what exactly did decent mean here?

An intern scooted past, sat herself down at the computer without a word and drew a curve. Everyone watched her, looked at it. Everyone liked what they saw. Boyish, but not androgynous. The curve united them all, and the point was settled.

The shoulders were feminine but not narrow, atop towers that swept down to the ground, narrowing as they went, with a slight bend halfway and the stylised representation of open palms placed flat on the ground below. A slender neck grew up from the torso and, above that, a head in perfect proportion with the body, hairless, faceless, nothing but the noble contour of a shapely domed cranium, tilted backward a little so that Gaia was looking towards the Earth. As the whole ensemble took shape on the computer, Lynn suffered stomach cramps and cold sweats, but she patiently took on the next challenge: how to use as much glass as possible while keeping the best possible protection against radiation. She declared that Gaia’s ‘face’ should be transparent, that she wanted to put the bars and restaurants in the head, while the back of the head could be clad and reinforced, where the chefs ruled their roost. Glass all over the throat and the curve of the breasts, where the suites were, and the showpiece was to be a huge Gothic window in the belly, four levels housing reception, casino, tennis courts and sauna, then glassed-in shins, and viewing platforms on the outside of the arms. Julian complained that the great window reminded him of having to go to church, back when he couldn’t object or resist. Lynn replaced the Gothic point with a Romanesque arch, and the window stayed.

All the rest – back and shoulder, ribs and neck, the top of the thighs and the inside of the arms – was clad with armoured cast-concrete slabs made from regolith, reinforced with sheet-glass sandwiches that held water between the panes to absorb particles and minimise heat loss. If the Americans were agreeable, the concrete was to be manufactured in the existing production facilities at the North Pole, made without water just by heating up the moonrock and casting it into construction-ready components at an automated factory. Mooncrete was said to be ten times more robust than ordinary concrete, resisting erosion, cosmic rays and micro-meteorites, and it was also cheap.

Gaia’s skeleton took shape. The spine was a massive main column enclosing all the cables and ducts that the building would need, as well as three high-speed lifts. Steel ribs sprouted from the column to bear the individual floors and the outer skin, and the secondary supports were anchored deep in the rock of the plateau. There didn’t seem to be any need for cross-bracing until somebody realised that the structure would be subject to much greater stresses than initial sketches suggested, since it was surrounded by vacuum, with no atmospheric resistance to the pressure of the artificial atmosphere within. Several assumptions had to be rejected, all the parameters frantically recalculated, until the experts declared that the problem had been solved. Since when, Lynn had had a new nightmare scenario to add to her visions of the end: a hotel that would at some moment suddenly go pop.

But Gaia shone.

She glowed from within, and she glowed with the help of the powerful floodlights that bathed her flawless snow-white exterior in white light. After years of struggle, Lynn had managed it. She had finished building the woman of Julian’s dream, at least for the most part. Some of the lower-end rooms still lacked plumbing, the multi-religious chapel at the bend of Gaia’s knees needed redundant life-support systems if it was to comply with all safety standards, and as for the banal detail of a spaceport, perhaps they would build one later to allow direct connections between Gaia and the OSS. On the other hand, the Lunar Express beat any direct approach hands down. It was undeniably more fun to arrive by train, and apart from that, they had a launch field for point-to-point flights on the Moon itself. It was all fine.