Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Fish has to feel at home, yes, that’s right.’

‘I just want to know what’s what. Don’t a great many fish need a permanent current, a steady oxygen supply, constant temperature, all of that?’

Kokoschka nodded thoughtfully, rubbed his bald head with a shy smile, scratched industriously at his three-day beard. He said, ‘Quite,’ and vanished. Karla watched him go, flummoxed.

‘Thanks for the explanation!’ she called after him.

‘Not exactly a great talker, is he?’ grinned Tim.

She speared a piece of mullet and made it vanish between her Modigliani lips.

‘If he can make a fish taste like this up here on the Moon, for all I care he can cut his own tongue out.’

Two restaurants and two bars took up four floors in Gaia’s head, their front walls all of glass. The panes curved right the way round to where the temples would be, so that there were wide-screen views all around. Selene and Chang’e, the two restaurants, were in the lower half, with the Luna Bar above them, and right up at the top the Mama Quilla Club for dancing under the stars. From there a glassed-in airlock led to the topmost point of the whole hotel, a viewing terrace which could only be entered in a spacesuit, offering a spectacular 360-degree view. Kokoschka’s shyness aside, he served the group of guests with exemplary attention, as did Ashwini Anand, Michio Funaki and Sophie Thiel. Lynn was praised from all sides for her hotel. She let her own food go cold as she cheerfully doled out information, answered questions at length, in high spirits and visibly flattered by the attention. For a while there was no other topic of conversation but this strange new world they now walked upon, Gaia, and the quality of the food.

Then the focus of talk shifted.

‘Chang’e,’ said Mukesh Nair thoughtfully over the main course, venison with truffles, served with wafer-thin slices of toast that gleamed as the foie gras melted on them. ‘Isn’t that a term from the Chinese space programme?’

‘Yes and no.’ Rogachev took a swig of the low-alcohol Château Palmer. ‘There were a few probes of that name; the Chinese sent them up to explore the Moon at the beginning of the century. But in fact it’s a mythological figure.’

‘Chang’e, the moon goddess.’ Lynn nodded.

‘Gaia seems to have a head full of myths then,’ smiled Nair. ‘Selene was the Greek moon goddess, wasn’t she? And Luna was the goddess in ancient Rome—’

‘Even I know that,’ said Miranda gleefully. ‘Luna, and then Sol the sun god, the jerk. Eternal gods, y’know, up, down, round and round, never stopping. One comes home and the other one leaves, like a married couple working different shifts.’

‘The sun and moon. Shift workers.’ Rogachev twitched his lips in a smile. ‘That makes sense.’

‘I am so interested in gods and astrology! The stars tell us our future, you know.’ She leaned forward, overshadowing the venison scraps on her plate with the great twin stars of her breasts, which she had poured into some shimmering scrap of almost nothing for the evening. ‘And do you know what? You want to hear something else?’ She stabbed the air with her fork. ‘Some of them, the ones that really had a clue what was going on in ancient Rome, they called her Noctiluca, they lit up a temple all for her, at night on the Palatine, that’s one of the hills in the city. I’ve been there, y’know, Rome’s like full of hills, not a city up in the hills though, it’s a city on the hills, if you get me.’

‘You should tell us more about your travels,’ Nair said amiably. ‘What does Noctiluca mean?’

‘The one who lights up the night,’ Miranda said solemnly, and rewarded herself with an uncommonly large gulp of red wine.

‘And Mama Quilla?’

‘Somebody’s mom, I’d guess. Julian, what’s Mama Quilla?’

‘Well, we were rather running out of moon goddesses,’ said Julian with relish, ‘but then Lynn dug up a few more, Ningal, the wife of Sin, the Assyrian god of the moon; Annit, she was Babylonian; Kusra from Arabia, Isis from Egypt—’

‘But we liked Mama Quilla most of all,’ Lynn spoke across him. ‘Mother Moon, an Inca goddess. Even today the heirs of the Inca culture worship her as the protector of married women—’

‘Oh, really?’ Olympiada Rogacheva pricked up her ears. ‘I think the bar might turn out to be my favourite place.’

Rogachev didn’t bat an eye.

‘I find it surprising that you considered using the Chinese moon goddess,’ said Nair, picking up the thread again hastily before the embarrassment could spread.

‘Why not?’ asked Julian artlessly. ‘Are we prejudiced?’

‘Well, you are China’s greatest competitor!’

‘Not me, Mukesh. You mean the USA.’

‘Yes, of course. But nevertheless, sitting here at this table I see Americans, Canadians, English and Irish, Germans, Swiss, Russians and Indians, and until a while ago we had the pleasure of our French friends’ company. But I don’t see a single Chinese person.’

‘Don’t worry, they’re here,’ said Rogachev equably. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, they’re not a thousand kilometres from here, south-west, busy digging away at the regolith.’

‘But they’re not here .’

‘No Chinese investor has shown an interest in our project,’ said Julian. ‘They want their own elevator.’

‘Don’t we all?’ remarked Rogachev.

‘Yes, but as you have rightly pointed out, unlike Moscow, Beijing is already mining helium-3.’

‘Talking of the elevator.’ Ögi scooped up foie gras onto the dark-red meat. ‘Is it true that they’re just about to make the breakthrough?’

‘The Chinese?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘They make that announcement with admirable regularity.’ Julian smiled knowingly. ‘If it were actually the case, Zheng Pang-Wang would not take every opportunity he can find to drink tea with me.’

‘But’ – Mukesh Nair propped himself up on his elbows and massaged his imposingly fleshy nose – ‘isn’t it the case that your American friends would take lasting umbrage if you were to flirt with the Chinese, especially after the Moon crisis last year? I mean to say, are you perhaps not quite so free in your decisions as you would like to be?’

Julian pursed his lips. His face darkened, as always when he set out to explain the extent of his independence of all government power. Then he spread his arms in a fatalistic gesture.

‘Just look, what’s the reason you’re all here? Even though the nation-states all make a big noise about how effective their space programmes are, they would leap at the chance to get in line with the Americans if the offer were ever made. Or let’s say, they’d try to deal as equal partners, meaning that they would pump money into NASA’s budget and then they’d get to stake their claims. But the offer’s never made, and there’s a very good reason for that. There’s an alternative, though. You can support me , and this offer is exclusively reserved for private investors. I’m not selling know-how, but I’m inviting participation. Whoever joins in can earn a great deal of money but can’t give away any formulas or blueprints. That’s why my partners in Washington are prepared to put up with this little dinner party of ours. They know that none of your countries are going to be building a space elevator in the foreseeable future, let alone developing the infrastructure to extract helium-3. There’s no technological basis, there’s no budget, in short, there’s nothing at all. Evidently, people such as yourselves would only ever lose money by investing in your own national space programmes at home. Which is why Washington is ready to believe that we’re just talking about shares and investment here. It’s a different matter with China though. Beijing has built the infrastructure! They’re mining the helium-3! They’ve laid their groundwork, but they are working with old-fashioned technology, which limits them. That’s their dilemma. They’ve already come too far to hitch themselves to another partner, but they simply don’t have the blasted elevator! Believe me, under the circumstances there’s not one Chinese politician or investor who would put even a single yuan into my hands, unless of course—’