Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Oh, Lynn. Does it have to be like that? Tim and I—’

  ‘They accept you as a representative, as a hostess.’

  ‘But I’m not the hostess.’

  ‘No, but you are in their eyes. You’re an Orley. Please, Amber!’

  That pleading tone!

  ‘Okay, fine, whatever. But put me on the second space-walk this afternoon!’

  ‘Oh, Amber, let me kiss you! You can walk all the way to Jupiter, I’ll make the sandwiches myself! Thank you!’

  * * *

  So here it was, the ladies’ programme.

  The fitness centre occupied two modules, elliptically flattened like the accommodation tubes. In the upper part there was a real sauna, without wooden benches, admittedly, but with straps for the hands and feet and generously sized windows, as well as a steam sauna, whose rounded walls copied the stars in the form of hundreds of tiny electric bulbs. In the crystal cave you could drift through droplets of ice-cold water that was sprayed into the room and then sucked back out again, in the quiet zone you could listen to celestial music, read or snooze. A floor further down, various fitness devices, massage rooms and strong hands waited for the stressed-out part-time astronauts.

  ‘—indispensable in space!’ Lurkin was saying. ‘Zero gravity is all well and good, but it contains a lot of dangers that shouldn’t be underestimated, if you’re exposed to it over a long period. You’ll already have noticed certain changes in yourself. Warming in the head and chest, for example. Immediately after the start of zero gravity, more than half a litre of blood rises from the lower regions of the body to the thorax and head. You’ll get apple cheeks and what astronauts call a ‘puffy face’. It’s a nice effect, by the way, because it compensates for wrinkles and makes you look younger. But not in the long term, unfortunately. Once you get back to Earth, gravity will tug at your tissues just as it always has done, so enjoy the moment.’

  ‘My legs are freezing,’ Rebecca Hsu said suspiciously, inflated in her dressing-gown until she looked like a globe made of terry towelling. ‘Is that normal?’

  ‘Quite normal. In accordance with the redistribution of your bodily fluids your legs will feel rather cold. You’ll get used to that, as you will to your outbreaks of sweating and temporary disorientation. I heard that one of you suffered quite badly from that?’

  ‘Madame Tautou,’ Miranda Winter said. ‘Wow! The poor woman keeps—’ She lowered her voice. ‘Well, it’s coming out everywhere, in fact.’

  ‘Space sickness.’ Lurkin nodded. ‘No reason to be ashamed, even experienced astronauts suffer from it. Who else has any other symptoms?’

  Olympiada Rogacheva hesitantly raised her hand. After a few seconds Momoka Omura pointed an index finger, before immediately retracting it again.

  ‘Nothing important,’ she said.

  ‘Well, with me it’s like this,’ Rebecca said. ‘My sense of balance is a bit confused. Even though I’m actually used to sailing.’

  ‘I’m just happy if I can keep everything down,’ Rogacheva sighed.

  Lurkin smiled. Of course she had been informed that the oligarch’s wife had a breakdown-related alcohol problem. Strictly speaking, Olympiada Rogacheva shouldn’t even have been here, but during the two-week training programme she had drunk nothing but tea, confounding all the sceptics. She could clearly manage without vodka and champagne, after all.

  ‘Never mind, ladies. By the day after tomorrow you’ll be immune to space sickness. But what affects everybody are physiological long-term changes. In zero gravity your muscle mass declines. Your calves will shrink to chicken legs, your heart and circulation will be overtaxed. That’s why daily sport is the chief duty of every astronaut, meaning exercise machine, gymnastics, weight-lifting, all nicely strapped in, of course. On long-term missions a considerable decline in bone substance has also been observed, particularly in the spine and leg areas. The body loses up to ten per cent of its calcium over six months in space, immune disorders appear, wounds heal more slowly, all concomitant effects that Perry Rhodan shamefully fails to mention. You’ll only be spending a few days in zero gravity, but I urge you to get some exercise. So what shall we start with? Rowing, cycling, jogging?’

  Momoka stared at Lurkin as if she had lost her mind.

  ‘No way. I want to go to the steam-room!’

  ‘And you’ll get to the steam-room,’ said Lurkin, as if talking to a child. ‘But first we’ll do a spot of fitness training, okay? That’s how it is on board space stations. The instructor’s word is final.’

  ‘Okay.’ Amber stretched. ‘I’m going on the exercise machine.’

  ‘And I’m going on the bike,’ Miranda cried with delight.

  ‘An exercise machine is a bike.’ Momoka pulled a face as if being subjected to a serious injustice. ‘Can we at least swim here?’

  ‘Of course.’ Lurkin spread her muscle-bound arms. ‘If you can find a way of keeping water in the pool in zero gravity, we can talk about it.’

  ‘And what about that?’ Rebecca looked at a device on the ceiling just above her head. ‘It looks like a step machine.’

  ‘Bingo! It trains up your bottom and your thighs.’

  ‘Exactly right.’ The Taiwanese woman peeled herself out of her dressing-gown. ‘You should never miss an opportunity to fight against physical decay. It’s dramatic enough! I feel as if it’s only my tight underwear that’s keeping me from exploding!’

  Amber, who knew Rebecca from the media, raised an eyebrow. Without a doubt, the queen of luxury had put on a fair bit of weight over the past few years, but her skin looked as smooth and tight as a balloon. What was it that Lurkin had said about ‘puffy faces’? Why should the effect be restricted to the face alone? It was obvious that upper arms shouldn’t wobble in zero gravity, that breasts were lifted because they weren’t being drawn towards the Earth’s core, that everything was deliciously rounded and firm. The whole of Rebecca Hsu looked somehow puffy.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You look great.’

  ‘For your age,’ Momoka added smugly.

  With Lurkin’s help, Rebecca wedged herself onto the step machine, allowed herself to be belted in and smiled down at Amber.

  ‘Thanks, but when the paparazzi need helicopters to get all of you into shot, it’s time to face the facts. I’m starting to turn to jelly. I distribute anti-cellulite miracle cures by some of the most famous cosmetic brands in the world, but slap me on the bum and you have to wait for a quarter of an hour until the waves have subsided.’

  And she started jogging like a peasant treading grapes, while Miranda Winter doubled up with laughter and Amber joined in. Momoka’s gestures passed through various stages of human development, then she laughed as well. Something was dissolved, a deep-seated, unconfessed anxiety, and they all rolled around cackling and panting.

  Lurkin waited with an indulgent expression on her face and her arms folded.

  ‘Glad we all agree,’ she said.

  * * *

  ‘Out you go!’

  Heidrun’s words were followed by a boisterous chortle.

  It was the last thing O’Keefe heard before he drifted out of the airlock. Heidrun, that bitch! Frank Poole, the unlucky astronaut from 2001, had fallen victim to a paranoid computer, now he to a homicidal Swiss woman. His fingers grasped the thruster controls. The first stimulus stopped his flight; the second, intended to turn him back towards the airlock, instead sent him into a spin.

  ‘Very good,’ he heard Nina say, as if she were sitting in the corner of his helmet with fairy-wings. ‘Wonderful reaction speeds for a beginner.’

  ‘Don’t start,’ he snarled.

  ‘No, I’m serious. Can you stop the spinning too?’

  ‘Why should he?’ laughed Heidrun. ‘It looks good. Hey, Finn, you should catch yourself a moon to orbit around you.’

  He rotated clockwise. Into the spin.

  And it worked. Suddenly he was hanging there motionless, watching the others spin out of the airlock
like space debris. The new, close-fitting generation of space-suits had the advantage of not making everyone who wore them look exactly the same. They let you have an idea of who was in front of you, even if their face was barely recognisable through the mirrored visor. Heidrun, clad like a Star Warrior, was given away by her anorexic, elf-like figure. He longed to give her a good kick.

  ‘I’ll get you for that,’ he mumbled, but couldn’t stop himself grinning.

  ‘Oh,Perry! My hero.’

  She carried on giggling, then got into difficulties and began to turn upside down. Someone else, it might have been Locatelli, Edwards or Mimi, started to retreat back inside the airlock. A third flailed his arms about. Nothing about the movement suggested it was happening voluntarily. Apart from Nina and Peter, only one member of the group displayed any signs of controlled movement, turning in a neat half circle and coming down to rest next to the two leaders. O’Keefe had no doubt it was Rogachev. Then, suddenly, they all floated back towards each other as if by magic.

  ‘A bit treacherous, isn’t it!’ laughed Peter. ‘Navigating in a vacuum is like nothing else. There’s no friction, no current to carry you, no resistance. Once you’re in motion you carry on that way until an adequate counter-impulse occurs, either that or you’ll drift into the sphere of some celestial body and end up as a meteor or make some pretty little crater. Using a thruster properly takes practice; practice you haven’t had. So that’s why, from now on, you don’t need to do anything. The remote control will take over. For the next twenty minutes we’re putting you on control beam, which means you can just sit back and enjoy the view.’

  They set off and flew rapidly out over the artificial platform, towards the half-built spaceship. They hovered weightlessly between the floodlight masts.

  ‘We try to limit EVAs to the absolute minimum of course,’ Nina explained. ‘By now, sunstorm forecasts have become accurate enough for us to take them into account during the planning stages of a mission. And in any case, no astronaut goes outside without a dosimeter. If an unexpected eruption takes place there’s still plenty of time to get back inside the station, and there are dozens of armoured storm shelters all around the outer walls of the OSS if it ever gets tight. But then again, even the most high-tech suit doesn’t provide long-lasting protection against radiation damage, so we’re increasingly reliant on robots.’

  ‘The flying things over there?’ said Locatelli in a shaky voice, pointing in the direction of two machines with arms but no legs, crossing their path a short distance away. ‘They look like goddamn aliens.’

  ‘Yes, it’s astonishing. Now that reality has emancipated itself from science fiction, it’s picking up its ideas. We’ve realised, for example, that humanoid machines accommodate their creators’ needs in all kinds of ways.’

  ‘Creation in our own image,’ said Mimi Parker. ‘Just like the boss did it six thousand years ago.’

  Something in those crudely chosen words made O’Keefe stop and think, but he decided to worry about it later. They flew in a wide curve and headed for the spaceship. One of the automatons had anchored itself onto the outer shell like a tick. His two main extremities disappeared inside an open shutter, where they were clearly in the process of installing something; two smaller arms around the machine’s upper body were holding components at the ready. The front side of its helmet-like head was adorned with black glassy peepholes.

  ‘Can they think?’ asked Heidrun.

  ‘They can count,’ said Nina. ‘They’re Huros-ED series robots, Humanoid Robotic System for Extravehicular Demands. Incredibly precise and utterly reliable. So far there’s only been one incident involving a Huros-ED, and it wasn’t actually caused by it. But after that their circuit board was extended to include a life-saving program. We use them for everything you can think of: servicing, maintenance, construction. If you end up in outer space, you have a very good chance of being picked up by a Huros and brought back safely.’

  Their route led them straight up over one of the floodlight masts and over the back of the spaceship.

  ‘It takes two to three days to get to the Moon by shuttle. They’re spacious, but just for fun try imagining during the flight that you’re on your way to Mars. Six months in a box like that, the sheer horror of it! Human beings aren’t machines; they need social contact, private lives, space, music, good food, beautiful design, food for the senses. That’s why the spaceship being created here isn’t like any conventional ship. Once it’s completed it will be an astonishing size; here you’re only seeing the main body, almost two hundred metres in length. To put it more precisely, it’s constructed from individual elements which are linked up with one another: partly burnt-out tanks from old space shuttles, partly new, larger models. Together they form the working and command area. There will be laboratories and conference rooms, greenhouses and processing plants. The sleep and training modules rotate on centrifugal outriggers around the main body of the ship to allow the presence of a weak artificial gravity, similar to the gravity on Mars. The next construction stage will be to extend it at the front and back, using masts several hundred metres in length.’

  ‘Several hundred metres?’ echoed Heidrun. ‘Good grief! How long is the ship going to be?’

  ‘About a kilometre, or so I’ve heard. And that’s excluding the sun wings and generators. Around two-thirds of them are situated on the front mast, at the peak of which there will be a nuclear reactor to provide the power. Hence the unconventional design: the living quarters have to be at least seven hundred metres away from the source of radiation.’

  ‘And when will the flight be?’ Edwards enquired.

  ‘Realists have their sights set on 2030, but Washington would prefer it to be earlier. After all, it’s not just a race to get to the Moon. The USA will do everything they possibly can, even if it means …’

  ‘… occupying the Red Planet,’ completed Rogachev. ‘We get the picture. Has Orley rented the entire hangar to the Americans?’

  ‘Part of it,’ said Nina. ‘Other areas of the station have been rented to the Germans, French, Indian and Japanese. Russians too. They’re all running research stations up here.’

  ‘But not the Chinese?’

  ‘No, not the Chinese.’

  Rogachev dropped the subject. Their flight led over the hangar towards the outer ring with its work stations and manipulators. Nina pointed out the far ends of the masts, which sprouted spherical objects: ‘The site and orbit regulation system. Orb-like tanks feed into the thrusters, which can be used to sink, lift or move the station.’

  ‘But why?’ asked O’Keefe. ‘I thought it had to stay at exactly this height?’

  ‘In principle, yes. On the other hand, if a meteorite or a particularly big lump of space debris were to come rushing towards us, we would need to be able to adjust the station’s position a little. Generally speaking we would know about things like that weeks in advance. A vertical shift would usually suffice, but sometimes it makes more sense to get out of the way by moving slightly to the side.’

  ‘That’s why the anchor station is a swimming island!’ called Mimi Parker. ‘So it can be moved around in synchrony with the OSS!’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Nina.

  ‘That’s crazy! And does it happen often? That kind of bombardment?’

  ‘Rarely.’

  ‘And you’d know the path of all objects like that?’ O’Keefe dug deeper.

  ‘Well.’ Peter hesitated. ‘The large ones, yes. But small odds and ends pass through here a million times without us needing to know about it: nano-particles, micro-meteorites.’

  ‘And what if something like that hits my suit?’ Edwards suddenly sounded as if he was longing to be back inside the station.

  ‘Then you’d have one more hole,’ said Heidrun, ‘and a nicely positioned one, hopefully.’

  ‘No, the suit can take that. The armoured plating absorbs nano-particles, and if a pinprick-sized hole really did appear, it wouldn’t have any immediate impact. Th
e fabric is interfaced with a polymer layer; its molecular chains close up as soon as the material reaches its melting point. And the friction heat from the impact of a micrometeorite alone would be enough to do that. You might end up with a small wound, but nothing more than you’d get from stepping on a sea urchin or having a run-in with your cat. The chance of crossing paths with a micrometeorite is far less than, let’s say, your chances of getting eaten by a shark.’

  ‘How reassuring,’ said Locatelli, his voice sounding strained.

  The group had crossed the outer edge of the ring and were now following the course of another pylon. O’Keefe would have liked ideally to turn around and go back. There should have been a fantastic view over the roof to the torus from here. But his spacesuit was like a horse that knew the way and went off all on its own. In front of him the pennons spread like a flock of dark glistening birds with mythical wingspans, keeping watch over these curious patches of civilisation in space. And beyond the solar panels that supplied the station with energy, there was only open space.

  ‘This section should be of particular interest to you, Mr Locatelli. It’s your stuff!’ said Peter. ‘We’d have needed four to five times as many panels using conventional solar technology.’

  Locatelli said something along the lines of that being entirely true. Then he added a few other things. O’Keefe thought he picked up the words revolution and humanity, followed by millstone, which was probably supposed to be milestone. Either way, for some reason it all jumbled up and sounded like guttural porridge.

  ‘You should be really proud of it, sir,’ said Peter. ‘Sir?’

  The object of his praise lifted both arms as if he were about to conduct an orchestra. A few syllables escaped from his throat.

  ‘Is everything okay, sir?’

  Locatelli groaned. Then they heard eruptive retching.

  ‘B-4, abort,’ said Nina calmly. ‘Warren Locatelli. I’ll accompany him back to the airlock. The group will continue on as planned.’