Except inside Lynn’s skull.
Gaia had collapsed so often in her nightmares that she had come to long for the day when catastrophe would come. A whole office full of certificates and affidavits swore that it would never happen, but she knew better. The thought that there was something she had overlooked had driven her mad, and madness was destructive.
None of you is safe, she thought, and introduced the woman …
* * *
‘—who will be looking after your comfort and security round the clock, together with her team. My dear friends, I’m delighted to present to you our hotel director, or should I say the manager here at Gaia, Dana Lawrence.’
The Lunar Express had arrived at the hotel’s station on schedule. They had run along the edge of the canyon for a while, so that they could enjoy the astonishing view of the building opposite, then crossed over at the further end and approached Gaia in a long, wide curve. Just in front of the hotel the ground sloped upward, so the builders had chosen not to take the rails straight up but to bring them into a tunnel, with the station itself underground. The track ended 300 metres beyond the gigantic figure, in a bare hall. This time there was no vacuum as they disembarked. They walked along gangways and into a wide pressurised corridor, with conveyor bands on the floor which brought them directly under the hotel, then from there to the lifts and up to the lobby, where islands of seating and elegant writing-desks made up one organic landscape. Fish glided behind aquarium panes. Perky little trees bursting with foliage flanked a curving reception desk, and above it holographic projections of the planets circled a bright central star, a model of the solar system with a sun in the middle spewing plasma from its surface. When the guests looked upwards, they could see the great hall vanishing in a nest of criss-crossing glass bridges. Since the reception hall was here in Gaia’s glass-fronted belly, with the huge Romanesque window arching in front, there was something cathedral-like about it. They looked out across the canyon to the sunlight on the other side and the pillars of the maglev marching away into the distance. The Earth shone up in the sky, a vision of home.
Dana Lawrence nodded at the group of guests.
She had searching grey-green eyes, an oval face and copper-coloured hair worn shoulder-length. Her high cheekbones and perfectly arched brows gave her an air of British reserve, almost of unapproachability. Even the sensual curve of her lips did little to change that. Only when she took the trouble to smile was the impression dispelled, but Dana was not overly generous with her smiles. She knew exactly what impression she made, and she knew that she came across as brisk, efficient and serious – something that people flying all the way to the Moon appreciated.
‘Thank you, Lynn,’ she said, and took a step forward. ‘I hope you had a pleasant journey. As perhaps you know, in future this hotel will have two hundred guests and a hundred staff. Since you’ll have the whole place to yourselves for the coming week, we’ve taken the liberty of cutting back on staff a little, though you won’t feel the lack. Our staff are quite experienced in being able to cater to a guest’s wishes before they’ve even been voiced. Sophie Thiel—’
She turned her head to a knot of young people who stood there wreathed in smiles, all dressed in Orley Group colours. A girlish woman with freckles stepped forward.
‘—is my right hand; she leads the housekeeping department and makes sure the life-support systems function without a hitch. Ashwini Anand’ – a delicate, Indian-looking woman with a proud gaze nodded her head – ‘is responsible for room service and, together with Sophie, takes care of technology and logistics. In the past, astronauts had to endure all sorts of discomforts, first and foremost in their diet. It’s been a long road from tube rations to the five-star meal, but you now have the choice between two excellent restaurants under the direction of our head chef, Axel Kokoschka.’ A thickset, bashful man with a baby face and bald head lifted his right hand, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘He’s assisted by our sous-chef, Michio Funaki, who will, among other things, be demonstrating how to make fresh-caught sushi on the Moon.’
Funaki, a wiry man with a buzz-cut, bowed with his whole upper body.
‘All four are highly qualified and have trained in some of the best hotels and kitchens in the world, on top of which they have had two years’ experience on the Orley Space Station, making each of them a seasoned astronaut, and they know Gaia’s systems just as thoroughly as they know all the transport options hereabouts. In future Sophie, Ashwini, Axel and Michio will be the middle management here in Gaia, but for the next few days they are exclusively at your service. The same is true of me. Please don’t hesitate to speak to me if you have any concerns. It’s an honour to have you here as our guests, and we are extremely pleased to see you.’
A smile, almost infinitely diluted.
‘If there are no further questions for the moment, I would like to show you the hotel. In one hour, we will expect you for dinner in the Selene.’
* * *
Under the lobby was the casino, a ballroom with a stage, a cocktail bar and gambling tables; one floor below began Gaia’s lower belly, and the female shape spread out wider at the hips, so that to everyone’s astonishment they found two tennis courts waiting for them.
‘There are two more outside,’ said Dana. ‘For hard-core players. It’s no problem playing in spacesuits, but the trouble comes with the balls. Here on the Moon they can fly hundreds of metres at a time, so we’ve fenced those courts in.’
‘How about golf?’ Edwards asked.
‘Golf on the Moon,’ said Mimi, giggling. ‘You’d never find the ball.’
‘Oh but you do,’ said Lynn. ‘We’ve tried it with tracking beacons in the balls. Via LPCS. It works.’
‘LP which?’
‘Lunar Positioning and Communication System. There are ten satellites orbiting the Moon, letting us communicate and find our way about up here. The golf course is on the other side of the canyon, Shepard’s Green. We also call it the “satellite links”.’
‘And who’s it named after?’ asked Karla.
‘Dear old Alan Shepard,’ Julian laughed. ‘A real pioneer, he landed with Apollo 14 on the plateau south of Copernicus. The old rascal had actually brought a couple of golf balls along and a six iron head. He hit it and said it went for miles and miles and miles—’
‘I most certainly will not be playing golf up here,’ said Aileen Donoghue, emphatically.
‘It’s not as bad as all that. He never went looking for his ball, but it can hardly have travelled more than two hundred, four hundred metres. Lunar golf is fun, but the trick of it is not to put too much into your swing.’
‘Don’t they just sink down into the dust?’
‘Too light,’ said Dana. ‘Try it sometime. We also have holographic tees here in the hotel. Would you like to see the spa?’
The sauna stretched out below the tennis courts, but most impressive of all was the swimming-pool in Gaia’s buttocks. It took up almost all the available area. The walls and ceiling simulated the starry sky, a hologram of the Earth glowed with a soft light, while the bottom of the pool and the floor all around were built to look like the lunar regolith, with rugged mountain chains on the horizon. The pool itself was a double crater, as large as a lake and surrounded by recliners. The illusion of bathing on the very surface of the Moon was practically perfect.
Heidrun turned her white face to O’Keefe and smiled. ‘So, who’s a big hero? Ready for a race?’
‘Any time.’
‘Careful! You know that I’m better.’
‘Just wait and see how things work out in reduced gravity,’ Ögi chuckled. ‘Could be I’ll leave you both behind.’
‘All right then, you know we’ve just got to have a swimming race,’ Miranda announced, spreading her fingers. ‘I lo-o-o-o-ove being in the water.’
‘I got it. Huey and Dewey.’ O’Keefe lowered his eyes reverently. ‘Lord love a duck.’
They visited the floor with the co
nference rooms, the multi-religious chapel, a meditation centre and a sickbay that gleamed reassuringly like a new pin, then up to Gaia’s ribcage. The group all had rooms on floors fourteen to sixteen, in the outer curve of the breasts. The lobby lay almost fifty metres below them. To get to their suites from the lifts, they had to cross the glass bridges. More bridges on the lower floors were set at zigzag angles, obviously placed quite at random. None of them had a railing.
‘Anyone suffer from vertigo?’ asked Dana. Sushma Nair raised her hand hesitantly. Some of the others looked disconcerted. This time Dana’s smile was a little broader.
‘Please understand. When you jump from a two-metre-high wall on the Earth, you reach the ground 0.6 of a second later. During that time, your body has accelerated to twenty-two kilometres an hour. On the Moon, the same jump would take three times longer, and your final speed would be less than half. That’s to say that you would have to jump from a height of twelve metres to get the same effect as a two-metre jump on the Earth, or in other words, on the Moon you could happily jump from three floors up in an ordinary high-rise. This means that you really don’t need to take the lift every time you want to go downstairs. Just jump from bridge to bridge, they’re barely four metres apart, which is nothing. Anybody want to try?’
‘I will,’ said Carl Hanna.
She gave him an appraising look. Tall, muscly, deliberate in his movements.
‘The real experts can jump back up again,’ she added meaningfully.
Hanna grinned and walked onto the nearest bridge.
‘If it turns out she was lying,’ he called to the others, ‘just throw her after me, okay?’
He sprang from the bridge with Donoghue’s cackles of laughter following after. He fell, and landed four metres below without the slightest jar.
‘Like jumping down from the kerbstone,’ he called up.
In the next moment O’Keefe sailed out from the edge, then Heidrun. They both landed as though they had never moved any other way.
‘My goodness,’ said Aileen, ‘My goodness!’ and then looked at each of them in turn, with a ‘My goodness!’ for everyone.
‘C’mon, guys,’ Chucky boomed. ‘Show us what you’re made of! Up you come!’
‘You’ll have to make room.’ Hanna shooed them away with a flap of his hands. They scurried backwards. He looked thoughtfully up at the ledge. When he raised his arms, he was just about two metres fifty tall, so there was still a metre and a half to make up.
‘How tall are you?’ O’Keefe asked, disconcerted.
‘Six foot three.’
‘Hmm.’ The Irishman rubbed his chin. ‘I’m five foot nine.’
‘Could be a near thing. Heidrun?’
‘One hundred and seventy-eight – five foot ten. Whatever. Whoever doesn’t make it has to stand us all a meal.’
‘Forget it.’ O’Keefe waved the idea away. ‘It’s all free here anyway.’
‘Then back on Earth. Hey, in Zürich! All right with that? A round of schnitzels in the Kronenhalle.’
‘Meaning all of us!’ called Julian.
‘Good, we’ll all jump together,’ Hanna declared. ‘Make room, so we don’t get in one another’s way. You guys up there, get back! Ready!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Heidrun grinned. ‘Ready.’
‘And up we go!’
Hanna sprang powerfully upwards. It looked astonishingly easy. As calmly as a superhero, he flew towards the ledge, grabbed hold, boosted himself up again and landed on his feet. Next to him Heidrun fluttered down, struggling for balance. O’Keefe’s hands threatened to slip off the edge of the bridge, then he clambered up, as elegantly as circumstances allowed.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Kronenhalle is cancelled.’
‘You’re all invited anyway,’ Ögi called out, in the tones of a man who embraces the whole world. ‘This is the first time ever that a Swiss has taken a standing jump of four metres. We’ll meet again in Zürich!’
‘Optimist,’ said Lynn, so quietly that only Dana heard.
The hotel director was stunned. She acted as though she hadn’t caught that wan little word with its insidious undertones.
What was the matter with Orley’s daughter?
‘Please bear in mind,’ she said out loud to the group, ‘that in reduced gravity your body will be losing muscle mass. There are two guest lifts here in Gaia, the E1 and E2, and a staff lift, but we nevertheless recommend that you work out a lot and take the shortcut via the bridges as often as you can. Now we’ll tell you a little more about the facilities and show you the rooms.’
* * *
Hanna had Sophie Thiel show him all the secrets of his suite. There was no essential difference between the life-support systems here and those aboard the space station.
‘The temperature is set to twenty degrees Celsius, but that’s adjustable,’ Sophie Thiel explained with a wide-screen smile, pointing out a button by the door; she brushed so close past Hanna as she did so that it was only just within the limits of professionalism. ‘Your suite has its own water management system, with wonderfully sterile water—’
‘Don’t use words like that to the customers,’ Hanna said, looking about and at the same time feeling her hungry gaze on his back. No two ways about it, this Thiel woman liked muscular men. ‘It sounds as if you’re setting out to poison somebody.’
‘Well then, let’s just call it fresh water. Ha ha.’
He turned to face her. Her eyes were half-moons, their colour barely discernible; on the other hand she looked as if she had a double ration of bright white teeth and inexhaustible reserves of laughter. She was not the least bit beautiful, but very pretty for all that. A grown-up version of Pippi Longstocking, or whatever that Swedish minx was called. He had found the film on a Sunday afternoon at a hotel in Germany, while he was waiting for hours on end for to meet somebody who had been floating dead in the Rhine all the while, and he had watched it all the way through, curiously moved. A childish, clunky old three-reeler, but the childhood it showed him was so amazingly different from his own that it was practically science fiction. He found himself unable to change channels. He’d never watched a kids’ movie before, or at least never one like this.
And he’d never watched another one.
Thiel showed him how the lighting was controlled, opened up a respectable mini-bar and told him the numbers to call if he needed anything. The look in her eyes said, if only things were different. I’ve worked in the best hotels in the world. Never with guests. You could hardly say that she put herself forward. She was friendly and professional, it’s just that she was also an open book.
But Hanna wasn’t here for fun and games.
‘If there’s anything else you’d like—’
‘No, not at the moment. I’ll manage.’
‘Oh, I almost forgot! You’ll find your moon slippers in the bottom of the wardrobe.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘We couldn’t think of a better name for them. They have lead plates in the soles, in case you want additional weight.’
‘Why would I want that?’
‘Some people prefer to move on the Moon the way they move on Earth.’
‘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:
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