Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘I see! Very far-sighted of you.’

The look in her eyes said, unless you take a bit of trouble .

‘Well then – till half past eight, in the Selene.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He waited until she’d gone. The suite displayed the same discreet, elegant sense of style as the lobby. Hanna didn’t know a great deal about design, nothing in fact, but even he could tell that this was the work of experts. After all, he’d had to learn a little about style and appearances to take on this role. Also, he liked clean lines, simple rooms. Much as he loved India, he had always felt rather hemmed in by the local sense of decor, the way they crowded every surface with knick-knacks.

His gaze swept over to the window that took up the whole wall.

They couldn’t have found a better place for the hotel, he thought. The plateau below Gaia could be reached by lift, and from here he saw it stretching away towards the canyon, its tennis courts lost and lonely. You must have a fantastic view of the hotel from down there, it would look like a floodlit sculpture. Over on the left, where the cliffs dropped back and the canyon closed, a natural-seeming path curved away to the other side.

What was it that Julian Orley had said just now? Over on the other side of the Lunar Express tracks was the golf course.

A golf course on the Moon!

Suddenly Hanna felt a touch of regret that he wasn’t actually here as the person everybody thought he was. He crushed the feeling before it could get to work on him, opened his silver suitcase and delved into it for his computer, a touchscreen device of the usual sort, no bigger than a chocolate bar, and his washbag. He took an electric trimmer from the depths of the bag. With a practised twist, he clicked the trimmer apart and took out a tiny circuit board, which he plugged into the computer. Whistling tunelessly, he booted up and watched as the program uploaded and hooked into the LPCS.

A few seconds later the device alerted him that he had a message.

He opened his mailserver. The message was from a friend, reminding him not to forget Dexter and Stacey’s wedding. Unimpressed by the pending nuptials of a couple who didn’t exist anyway, he filtered out the white noise that made up the rest of the message and came up with a few more lines of text, nothing more than the addresses of several dozen internet sites. Then he uploaded a symbol – snaking reptilian necks, twisted and knotted together, all growing from a single body – and waited a moment.

Something was happening.

Words and syllables slotted together with lightning speed. The actual message took shape before his eyes. Even while the reconstruction was still under way, he knew there had been trouble. The text was short, but peremptory:

The package has been damaged. It is no longer responding to commands and cannot reach deployment under its own power. This changes your mission. You will repair the package or bring the contents to operational destination yourself. If circumstances permit, you can bring forward insertion. Act swiftly!

Swiftly.

Hanna stared at the display. The implications were quite clear, as present as an unwelcome visitor. Swiftly meant now, or as soon as possible without arousing suspicion. It meant that he would have to leave and then return while everybody was asleep.

Back to Peary Base.

Since they had made love free-floating in orbit, Tim had spared Amber any further speculation about the state of Lynn’s mental health, and tried to convince himself that he was showing consideration for his wife, since she was so grimly determined to enjoy the trip; in fact it was because he was quite busy enough grappling with his own dilemmas. More and more he found himself enjoying a trip that he had resolved whole-heartedly to hate: the way the trip had been arranged, Julian’s arrogant and high-handed part in it. And the more he was having fun, the more he felt a creeping adolescent sense of betrayal. He was susceptible, he had been corrupted, and by a ticket! He tried to persuade himself that it was only the overwhelming experiences and impressions that somehow, against all expectation, made him like the old snake-charmer. Hadn’t he been dead set on hating Julian, the megalomaniac, who couldn’t see that he trampled other people underfoot on his march into the future? Who neglected his nearest and dearest, or put them on pedestals, who couldn’t understand that they needed a drop of normality in their lives?

It would have been so wonderfully simple just to hate him.

But the Julian he had got to know in the narrow confines of the spaceship unnerved him by not being ignorant and egomaniacal, or at least not enough to bear out Tim’s sweeping condemnation. Rather, he reminded Tim of his childhood, when he had admired Dad so much. Reminded him of Crystal, who right up to the very moment her sanity had finally crumbled away had insisted that she had never known a more loving man than his father, who had called him her sunbeam, bringing her happiness – all too quickly, before he was gone again. She had praised and admired him, and an hour before she died, he had taken to the skies in a sub-orbital craft of his own design, slipping away into the thermosphere even though he knew how critical her condition was. He had known it – and had forgotten just long enough to break a record, win a prize and earn his son’s everlasting enmity.

Lynn had forgiven Julian.

Tim had not.

Instead he had been hard at work demonising the man. And even now he couldn’t forgive Julian, even if, or perhaps even because, he could see the pillars that held up his hatred crumbling away. This hotel couldn’t have been built solely out of greed and a ruinous sense of self-aggrandisement. There must be more behind it, a dream too overpowering to be shared with only a few family members. Whether he wanted to or not, secretly he was beginning to understand the old guy, the fever in his blood that made him push back all boundaries, his nomadic nature that let him blaze trails where others saw only dead ends, his passionate attachment to progress, innovation, and he began to grow jealous of Julian’s great love, the world. And as this change of mind smouldered away below the surface of all he thought he had believed, he felt uncomfortably aware that perhaps he was overreacting where Lynn was concerned, perhaps – without ever intending to! – he was using her as an excuse to get at Julian, that in fact he cared less about her happiness than about Julian’s guilt. He flirted with the idea that perhaps she really did feel as fine as she was always claiming, and that he had no reason to feel ashamed of mellowing towards his dad. And suddenly, over dinner in Gaia’s nose, or rather where her nose would be if she had one, with the magnificent view of the canyon before his eyes, he wanted nothing more than just to be allowed to have fun, without the ghosts of his past sitting down at table with him, the ghosts that brought out the worst in him.

‘It looks like you’re enjoying that,’ Amber said appreciatively.

They were seated at a long table in Selene, with its black-blue-silver decor, eating red mullet with a saffron risotto. The fish tasted fresh-caught, as though it had just come from the sea.

‘Bred in salt water,’ Axel Kokoschka, the chef, informed them. ‘We’ve got great big underground tanks.’

‘Isn’t it rather complicated to re-create ocean conditions up here?’ asked Karla Kramp. ‘I mean, you don’t just tip salt into the water?’

Kokoschka considered the question. ‘Not just that, no.’

‘Salinity varies from one biotope to the next down on Earth, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it take a particular chemical composition to make an environment where animal life can thrive? Chloride, sulphate, sodium, traces of calcium, potassium, iodine, and so on.’