Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Palstein was gazing off into the distance. He spoke as though giving a lecture, his voice analytical but without empathy.

  ‘That was the moment when private capital took the sceptre from government hands once and for all. Human beings became human resources. The parties in the democratic countries were too busy treading on one another’s toes, and the totalitarian powers were wheeling and dealing on their own behalf as always, and meanwhile the big companies forced their way into every aspect of social life and set up shop for modern society. They took over the water supply, medicine, the food chain, they privatised education, built their own universities, hospitals, old folks’ homes, graveyards, and it was all bigger, better and more beautiful than what the State had to offer. They formed an anti-war movement, they started aid programmes for the underprivileged, they took up arms against hunger and thirst and torture, against global warming, overfishing and resource depletion, against social division, the gap between the rich and the poor. And as they did so, they were reinforcing divisions by deciding who had access and who didn’t. They set up generous research budgets, and made the research serve their goals. Planet Earth had been the heritage of all humanity, but now it became an economic asset. They opened up every corner of the planet, every resource. At the same time they put a price on everything, from sources of fresh water all the way to the human genome, they took the world which had been common to all and they drew up a catalogue listing what belonged to which owner, they imposed usage fees, access protocols; if you’ll let me coin a rather loaded phrase, they put a turnstile on all Creation. Even free education and drinking water tie people into the commercial ideology once they accept the offer, it’s the vision of a brand name.’

  ‘Wasn’t it always like that?’ said Keowa. ‘That the many are rewarded for following the vision of the few, and if they don’t, they can expect to be cast out and punished?’

  ‘You’re talking about dictators and all their pomp and show. Tutankhamun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.’

  ‘There are other forms of dictatorship, gentler ones.’

  ‘Ancient Rome was a gentle dictatorship.’ Palstein smiled. ‘The Romans reckoned that they were the freest people on earth. That was something quite different, Loreena, I’m talking about rulers seizing power who don’t even have a country, their states aren’t shown on the map. The fact that the oil companies look like losing this battle doesn’t mean that industry’s grip on politics is loosening, quite the opposite. It just shows that influence has shifted. Here on Earth, Incorporated, other departments have become more influential, and to that extent, you’re absolutely right: Orley takes EMCO’s place. It’s just that EMCO acted in America’s interests, because our people were in government, but Orley doesn’t even want to govern. That’s what makes him so unpredictable. That’s what the governments are afraid of. And now, please consider the whole long history of state failure, and just ask yourself whether this kind of power transfer is really such a bad thing.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Keowa cocked her head. ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just want you to look at the situation as though it were an equation, look at all the variables, without fear or favour. Can you do that?’

  Keowa considered this. Palstein had drawn her into a strange kind of conversation here. She had set out to interview him, and analyse him, and now the tables were turned.

  ‘I believe so,’ she said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘There is no ideal state of things. But there are approximations. Some of them have been hard-won. When we abolished slavery, the idea of the free citizen won out, at all levels of society. The citizen of a democratic state is bound by the laws but fundamentally free, isn’t that right?’

  ‘D’accord.’

  ‘But if you’re a member of a company, you’re property. That’s the change that’s happening all over.’

  ‘Also right.’

  ‘It seems to me about as difficult to break out of this pattern as it would be to suspend the laws of nature. The freedom of the individual is nothing but an idea by now. We live on a globe, and globes are closed systems, they offer no chance of escape and the globe is all divided up. At this very moment, while we sit here on this beautiful lake talking the whole thing through, the Moon in its orbit is being divided up, way over our heads, that’s the next globe. There’s no such thing as uncommercialised space any more.’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Well, excuse me, Gerald, yes, I’m a realist – but I’ll fight this to the very end!’

  ‘That’s your prerogative. I can understand your position, but please, think about it. You can hate the very thought of being property. Or you can make some kind of compromise with it.’ Palstein ran a rope through his fingers and laughed. All of a sudden he seemed very relaxed, a Buddha at rest. ‘And perhaps compromise is the better choice.’

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

  The sun was losing mass.

  Every minute, sixty million tonnes of material in its mantle was lost, protons, electrons, helium atoms and a few other elements with walk-on roles, the ingredients for that mysterious molecular cloud that supposedly gave birth to all the celestial bodies in our system. The solar wind streamed ceaselessly outward, blowing comets off course, fluorescing in the Earth’s atmosphere as the aurorae borealis and australis, sweeping away the accretions of gas in interplanetary space and gusting out, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, to the Oort cloud. Cosmic background radiation joined the mix, weak but omnipresent, a newsfeed at the speed of light, speaking of supernovae, neutron stars, black holes and the birth of the universe.

  Ever since the Earth had collided with a proto-planet named Theia and given birth to the Moon, its satellite had been defenceless against all these influences, exposed. The sun’s breath blew constantly over the lunar surface. It had no magnetic field to deflect the high-energy particles, and although they only penetrated a few micrometres deep, the lunar dust was saturated with them, and four and a half billion years of meteorite bombardment had turned the whole surface over and over like a ploughed field. Since its creation, the Moon had soaked up so much solar plasma that it held enough to bring mankind up here, hungry for resources, armed with spaceships and mining machinery to rip away the Moon’s dowry.

  * * *

  Sometimes there were sunstorms.

  Spots formed on the sun’s surface, huge arcs of plasma leapt across the raging ocean of fire, hurling umpteen times the usual amount of radiation out into space, and the solar wind became a hurricane, howling through the solar system at twice its usual speed. When this happened, astronauts were well advised to huddle in their habitation modules and not, if at all possible, to be caught in a travelling spaceship. Each ionised particle that passed through a human cell damaged the genetic material irreparably. Every twelve years the solar hurricanes were more frequent: as recently as 2024 they had stopped shuttle traffic for a while and forced the residents at the moon bases underground. Even machines did not cope well with these particle storms, which damaged their outer skin and wiped the data stored in their microchips, caused short-circuits and unwanted chain reactions.

  Everyone agreed that sunstorms were the biggest danger of manned space flight.

  * * *

  On 26 May 2025, the sun was breathing calmly and evenly.

  As usual, its breath streamed out into the heliosphere, passed Mercury, mingled with the carbon dioxide on Venus and Mars and with the Earth’s atmosphere, blew straight through the gaseous shells of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, washed up on the shores of all their moons and of course reached the Earth’s satellite as well, each particle travelling at 400 kilometres per second. The particles ploughed into the regolith, clinging to the grey dust, spread out across the plains and the crater walls, and a few billions also collided with the female colossus at the edge of the Vallis Alpina in the lunar north, without penetrating her skin, at least in the parts reinforced
with mooncrete. Gaia sat there on her cliff edge, unmoved by the cosmic hailstorm, her eyeless face turned towards the Earth.

  Julian’s woman in the Moon.

  * * *

  Lynn’s nightmare.

  The stranded ocean liner clinging to the volcanic slopes of the Isla de las Estrellas, the OSS Grand, both of these were products of her imagination. Gaia, though, was from a dream that Julian had had, in which he saw his daughter sitting on the Moon, none other, a figure all of light in front of the black brocade of space sewn with its millions of stars. Typically for him, he saw Lynn exaggerated to the scale of a metaphor, an ideal of humanity, journeying onward, wise and pure, and he woke up and called her there and then from bed and told her about his dream. And of course Lynn enthusiastically took up the idea of a hotel shaped like the human form, congratulated her father and promised to draw up preliminary designs right away, while this sublime vision that was supposed to be her actually turned her stomach so much that she couldn’t sleep for a week. Her eating disorders reached a whole new anorexic level, and she began to gobble down little green tablets to help her master her fear of failure, but somehow she managed to place the colossus at the edge of the Vallis Alpina, a giant of a woman, named after Mother Earth in ancient Greek myth.

  Gaia.

  And she had built this woman! The very last of her energy might have burnt away in the fury of creation, but in return, she could claim a masterpiece. At least, everybody told her that’s what it was. She felt no such certainty. The way Julian saw things, she was supposed to recover by working on Gaia; he thought that the project would be a therapy, a countermeasure for the last symptoms of that fearful illness she had just recovered from. He had barely had a clue what the illness was – about as much as if she’d been abducted by aliens and taken to some far-off planet. It was also typical that Julian had convinced himself she was ill because she was short on challenges, stifled by routine, that too much of the same old thing had made her quick blood sluggish. Lynn had been the perfect leader of Orley Travel, the group’s tourism arm, for years now. Perhaps she was yearning for something exciting, something new. Perhaps she was understimulated. She made the world run on time, but was the world enough? Back in the late 2010s private sub-orbital spaceflight had been part of the portfolio of Orley Space, along with tourist trips to the OSS and to the smaller orbital hotels, but strictly speaking, all these things were tourism as well.

  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.