Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Really not—’

  ‘No, I’m sure I do,’ Rogachev says thoughtfully. ‘Wasn’t there a swimming accident?’

  ‘That’s right. Our happiness lasted only two years.’ Miranda stares straight ahead. Suddenly she sniffs and rubs something from the corner of her eye. ‘It happened off the coast of Miami. Heart attack, when swimming, and now can you imagine what his children have done, the revolting brats? Not ours, we didn’t have any, the ones from Louis’s previous marriage. They only go and sue me! Me, his wife? They’re saying I contributed to his death, can you believe it?’

  ‘And did you?’ O’Keefe asks innocently.

  ‘Idiot!’ For a moment Miranda looks deeply hurt. ‘Everybody knows I was acquitted. What can I do about it if he leaves me thirteen billion? I could never harm anyone, I couldn’t hurt a fly! You know what?’ She looks Olympiada deep in the eyes. ‘As a matter of fact I can’t do anything at all. But I do it really well! Hahaha! And you?’

  ‘Me?’ Olympiada looks as if she’s been ambushed.

  ‘Yes. What do you do?’

  ‘I—’ She looks pleadingly at Oleg. ‘We’re—’

  ‘My wife is a member of the Russian Parliament,’ says Rogachev without looking at her. ‘She’s the daughter of Maxim Ginsburg.’

  ‘Hey! Oh, my God! Wooaahh! Ginsburg, wooooww!’ Miranda claps her hands, winks conspiratorially at Olympiada, thinks for a moment and asks greedily: ‘And who’s that?’

  ‘The Russian president,’ Rogachev explains. ‘Until last year at least. The new one’s called Mikhail Manin.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Hasn’t he done it before?’

  ‘He hasn’t, in fact.’ Rogachev smiles. ‘Maybe you mean Putin.’

  ‘No, no, it’s longer ago, something with an “a” and “in” at the end.’ Miranda trawls through the nursery of her education. ‘Nope, it’s not coming.’

  ‘Maybe you mean Stalin?’ O’Keefe asks slyly.

  The PA system puts an end to all their speculation. A soft, dark woman’s voice issues safety instructions. Almost everything she says sounds to Evelyn like a perfectly normal aeroplane safety routine. They fasten their belts, like horse harnesses. In front of each row of seats, monitors light up and transmit vivid camera pictures of the outside world, giving the illusion that you’re looking through windowpanes. They see the inside of the cylinder, increasingly illuminated by the rising sun. The hatch closes, life-support systems spring to life with a hum, then the seats tip backwards so that they’re all lying as if they’re at the dentist’s.

  ‘Tell me, Miranda,’ whispers O’Keefe, turning his head towards Miranda. ‘Do you still have names for them?’

  ‘Who?’ she asks back, just as quietly. ‘Oh, right. Of course.’ Her hands become display units. ‘This one’s Huey. That other one’s Dewey.’

  ‘What about Louie?’

  She looks at him from under lowered eyelids.

  ‘For Louie we’ll have to get to know each other better.’

  At that moment a jolt runs through the cabin, a tremor and a vibration. O’Keefe slips lower in his seat. Evelyn holds her breath. Rogachev’s face is blank. Olympiada has her eyes shut. Somewhere someone laughs nervously.

  What happens next is nothing, but nothing, like the launch of a plane.

  * * *

  The lift accelerates so quickly that Evelyn feels momentarily as if she has merged with her seat. She is pressed into the plump upholstery until arms and armrests seem to have become one. The vehicle shoots vertically out of the cylinder. Below them, from the perspective of a second camera, the Isla de las Estrellas shrinks to a long, dark scrap with a turquoise dot inside it, the pool. Was it really only yesterday that she was lying down there, critically eyeing her belly, bewailing the extra four kilos that had recently driven her from bikini to one-piece, while everyone around her was constantly insisting that her weight increase suited her and stressed her femininity? Forget the four kilos, she thinks. Now she could swear she weighs tonnes. She feels so heavy that she’s afraid she might at any moment crash through the floor of the lift and plop down in the sea, causing a medium-sized tsunami.

  The ocean becomes an even, finely rippling surface, early sunlight pours in gleaming lakes across the Pacific. The lift climbs the cable at incredible speed. They hurtle through high-altitude fields of vapour, and the sky becomes bluer, dark blue, deep blue. A display on the monitor informs her that they are travelling at three times, no, four times, eight times the speed of sound! The earth curves. Clouds scatter to the west, like fat snowflakes on water. The cabin accelerates further to twelve thousand kilometres an hour. Then, very slowly, the murderous pressure eases. The seat begins to heave Evelyn back up again, and she completes the transformation back from dinosaur to human being, a human being who cares about an extra four kilos.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board OSS Spacelift One. We have now reached our cruising speed and passed through the Earth’s lower orbit, the one in which International Space Station ISS circles. In 2023 operation of the ISS was officially halted, and since then it has served as a museum featuring exhibits from the early days of space travel. Our journey time will be about three hours, the space debris forecast is ideal, so everything suggests that we will arrive at OSS, Orley Space Station, in good time. At present we are starting to pass through a Van Allen radiation belt, a shell of highly charged particles around the Earth, caused by solar eruptions and cosmic radiation. On the Earth’s surface we are protected from these particles; above an altitude of one thousand kilometres, however, they are no longer deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, and flow directly into the atmosphere. Around here, or more precisely at an altitude of seven hundred kilometres, the inner belt begins. It essentially consists of high-energy protons, and reaches its highest densities at an altitude of between three thousand and six thousand kilometres. The outer belt extends from altitudes of fifteen to twenty-five thousand kilometres, and is dominated by electrons.’

  Evelyn is startled to note that the pressure has completely disappeared. No, more than that! For a brief moment she thinks she’s falling, until she realises where she has had this strange feeling of being released from her own body before. She experienced it briefly during the zero-gravity flights. She is weightless. In the main monitor she sees the starry sky, diamond dust on black satin. The voice from the speaker assumes a conspiratorial tone.

  ‘As many of you may have heard, critics of manned space travel see the Van Allen belts as an impassable obstacle on the way to space because of the high concentration of radiation. Conspiracy theorists even see them as proof that man was never on the Moon. Supposedly it would only be possible to pass through them behind steel walls two metres thick. Be assured, none of this is true. The fact is that the intensity of the radiation fluctuates greatly according to variations in solar activity. But even under extreme conditions, the dosage, as long as you are surrounded by aluminium three millimetres thick, is half of what is considered safe under general radiation protection regulations for professional life. Generally it’s less than one per cent of that! In order to protect your health to the optimum degree, the passenger cabins of this lift are armoured accordingly, which is, incidentally, the chief reason for the lack of windows. As long as you don’t feel an urge to get out, we can guarantee your complete safety as you pass through the Van Allen belt. Now enjoy your trip. In the armrests of your seats you will find headphones and monitors. You have access to eight hundred television channels, video films, books, games—’

  The whole caboodle, then. After a while Nina Hedegaard and Peter Black come floating over, handing out drinks in little plastic bottles that you have to suck on to get anything out of them, finger food and refreshment towels.

  ‘Nothing that could spill or crumble,’ Hedegaard says, with a Scandinavian sibi-lance on the S. Miranda Winter says something to her in Danish, Hedegaard replies, they both grin. Evelyn leans back and grins too, even though she didn’t understand a word. She just fe
els like grinning. She is flying into space, to Julian’s far-away city …

  * * *

  … in which she felt now as if she were alone with the Earth. It lay so far below her, so small, that it looked as if she would just have to reach out and the planet would slip softly into the palm of her hand. Gradually the darkness faded towards the west and the Pacific began to glow. China still slept, while staff in North America were already hurrying to their lunch-breaks, talking on their phones, and Europe was spinning towards the end of the working day. She was astonished to realise that three more earths would have fitted in the space between her and the blue and white sphere, although it would have been a bit of a tight squeeze. Almost 36,000 kilometres above her home, the OSS drifted in space. That in itself stretched her imagination to its limits, and yet to reach the Moon they would have to travel ten times as far.

  After a while she pushed herself away from the window and floated over to one of the upside-down sofas. She clambered rather inelegantly into it. Strictly speaking, there was no point in even having furniture in a place like this. Underwater, buoyancy compensated for gravitation to allow you to float, but you were still subject to influences such as water density and current, while in zero gravity no forces at all affected the body. You didn’t weigh anything, you didn’t tend to move in any particular direction, you didn’t need a chair to keep you from falling on your behind, or the comfort of soft cushions, or a bed to stretch out on. Basically you needed only to float in the void with your legs and forearms bent, except that even the tiniest motor impulses, a twitch of a muscle, were enough to set the body drifting, so that you were in constant danger of cracking your head in your sleep. Millions of years of genetic predisposition also required you to lie on something, even if it was vertical or stuck to the ceiling. At the same time concepts such as ‘vertical’ were irrelevant in space, but people were used to systems of reference. Investigations had shown that space travellers found the idea of an earth at their feet more natural than one floating above their heads, which was why psychologists encouraged the so-called gravity-oriented style of construction, to create the illusion of a floor. You just strapped yourself firmly to the bed, in the chair you acted as if you were sitting down, and in the end it felt almost homey.

  She stretched, did a somersault and decided to go – float, rather – to breakfast. In the concave wall that seemed to conceal the life-support system, there was a wardrobe from which she chose a pair of dark three-quarter-length trousers and a matching T-shirt and tight-fitting slippers. She paddled over to the bulkhead and said, ‘Evelyn Chambers. Open.’

  The computer tested pressure, atmosphere and density, then the module opened to reveal a tube several metres across. Many miles of such tubes stretched all the way across the station, connecting the modules to one another and with the central structure, and creating lines of communication and escape routes. Everything was subject to the redundancy principle. There were always at least two possible ways of leaving a module, each computer system had matching mirror systems, there were several copies of the life-support systems. Months before the trip, Evelyn had tried to imagine the massive construction by studying it using models and documents, before establishing, as she had now, that her fantasy had been blinding her to the reality. In the isolation of the cell in which she was staying, she could hardly imagine the colossus that loomed above it, its size, its complex ramifications. The only thing that was certain was that next to it the good old ISS looked like a toy out of a blister pack.

  She was on board the biggest structure in space ever created by human beings.

  In homage to the concept of the space elevator, the designers had built the OSS on a vertical. Three massive steel masts, each one 280 metres high, arranged at an equal angle to each other, formed the spine, connected at the base and the head, producing a kind of tunnel through which the cables of the lift passed. Like the storeys of a building, ring-shaped elements called tori stretched around the masts, defining the five levels of the facility. At the bottom level lay the OSS Grand, the space hotel. Torus-1 housed comfortable living rooms, a snack and coffee bar, a room with a holographic fireplace, a library and a rather desperate-looking crèche, which Julian stubbornly planned to extend: ‘Because children will come, they will love it!’ In fact, since its opening two years previously, although the OSS Grand had been well booked, there had so far been no families. Very few people were willing to entrust their offspring to the weightless state, a fact that Julian defiantly dismissed by saying, ‘Nothing but prejudice! People are so silly. It’s no more dangerous up here than it is in the stupid Bahamas, quite the contrary. There’s nothing up here to bite you, you can’t drown, you don’t get jaundice, the natives are friendly, so what is there to worry about? Space is paradise for children!’

  Perhaps it was just that people had always had a twisted relationship with paradise.

  Like a predatory shark, Evelyn snaked her way along the pipe. You could move incredibly quickly in zero gravity if you put your mind to it. On her way she passed numbered side-tunnels, with suites similar to her own behind them. Every unit consisted of five modules, each divided into two living units and arranged in such a way that all the guests enjoyed an unimpeded view of the Earth. The connection to the torus branched off to the right, but Evelyn fancied breakfast, and continued along the course of the tunnel. It opened out into the Kirk, one of the two most spectacular modules of the OSS. Disc-shaped, these protruded far above the accommodation areas, so that Earth could be seen through the glass floor. The Kirk served as a restaurant; its counterpart to the north, appropriately christened the Picard, alternated between lounge, nightclub and multimedia centre.

  ‘Making this glass floor stretched us to the limits,’ Julian never tired of stressing. ‘What a struggle! I can still hear the builders’ complaints in my ears. So? said I. Since when have we cared about limits? Astronauts have always yearned for windows, lovely great big panoramic windows, except that the walls weren’t strong enough on the flying sardine-tins of the past. The problem was solved with the lift. We need mass? Send it up there. We want windows? Let’s put some in.’ And then, as he always did, he lowered his voice and whispered almost reverently. ‘Building them like that was Lynn’s idea. Great girl. She’s pure rock ’n’ roll! I tell you.’

  The communication hatch leading to the Kirk was open. Evelyn remembered the hazards of her newly won freedom too late, clutched at the frame of the lock to halt her flight, missed it and flew through, flailing her arms, past a not especially startled waiter. Someone grabbed her ankle.

  ‘Trying to get to the Moon all by yourself?’ she heard a familiar voice say.

  Evelyn gave a start. The man drew her down to eye-level.

  His eyes—

  Of course she knew him. Everyone knew him. She’d had him on her show at least a dozen times, but she still couldn’t get used to those eyes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed, bewildered.

  ‘I’m the evening entertainment.’ He grinned. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Morale booster for space grouches. Julian and the media, you know …’ She shook her head and laughed. ‘Incredible. Has anyone seen you?’

  ‘Not yet. Finn’s here, I heard.’

  ‘Yeah, he was suitably dismayed to bump into me here. He’s become quite trusting now though.’

  ‘No pose is a pose in itself. Finn enjoys playing the part of the outsider. The less you ask him, the more answers you’ll get. You up for breakfast?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Great, me too. And then?’

  ‘To the multimedia centre. Lynn’s giving us an introduction to the station. They’ve divided us up. Some people are having the scientific aspect explained to them, the others are going out to play.’

  ‘And you aren’t?’

  ‘No, I am, but later. They can only take six people out at any one time. You fancy coming?’

  ‘I’d love to, but I’ve got no time. We’re sho
oting a video in Torus-4.’

  ‘Oh, really, you’re doing something new? Seriously?’

  ‘Not another word.’ He smiled, putting a finger to his lips. His eyes whisked her off to another galaxy. ‘Remember, someone has to take care of the old folks.’

  * * *

  Lynn smiled, answered questions, smiled again.

  She was proud of the multimedia space, just as she was intensely proud of the whole OSS Grand, of the Stellar Island Hotel and the far-away Gaia. At the same time they all filled her with terrible anxiety, as if she had built Venice on matchstick foundations. Everything she did was affected by that awareness. She tortured herself with apocalyptic scenarios, and catharsis was possible only if her worst fears proved to be well founded. She was trapped in a terrible internal struggle, in which she tirelessly pursued another version of herself. The more arguments she produced to quell her anxieties, the bigger they became, as if she were approaching a Black Hole.

  I’m going to lose my mind, she thought. Just like Mom. I’m definitely going insane.

  Smile. Smile.

  ‘Lots of people see OSS as a mushroom,’ she said. ‘Or a parasol, or a tree with a flat crown. A bar table. Other people see a medusa.’

  ‘What’s a medusa again, darling?’ asked Aileen, as if talking about some kind of fashionable gewgaw that teenagers might be interested in.

  ‘It’s a sort of jellyfish thing,’ Ed Haskin replied. ‘You’ve got this gooey umbrella thing at the top, with tentacles and other sorts of gooey stuff dangling from the bottom.’

  Lynn bit her lips. Haskin, previously a director of the spaceport and for a few months now responsible for the whole technical sector, was a nice man, very competent, and sadly equipped with the sensitivity of a Neanderthal.

  ‘They’re also very beautiful creatures,’ she added.

  They were both orbiting a four-metre-tall holographic model of OSS, projected into the centre of Picard. Drifting in their wake through the virtual space came Walo Ögi, Aileen and Chuck Donoghue, Evelyn Chambers, Tim and some recently arrived French scientists. The Picard had a different design from the Kirk, which was closer to classical restaurant style. Here floating islands of conviviality were arranged on different levels, bathed in muted light and overlooked by a long bar that cried out to be populated by Barbarellas with heavy eyeliner. At the touch of a button, everything could be reconfigured, so that tables and seats grouped themselves into an atrium.