Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  His heart beating wildly, he stopped and turned his head. Xin was standing at the end of the train, staring at him.

  He wasn’t following.

  The arsehole didn’t have the guts!

  Grand Cherokee took another step and slipped between two of the spars.

  His heart stopped beating. Like a cat falling, he flung out all four limbs, grabbed hold of the rail and for a hideous moment swung there above the abyss before he managed, using all his strength, to heave himself up. Panting like an engine, he tried to stand. He was halfway between the boarding platform and the curve of the corner, and the track was beginning to tilt. The wind fluttered his coat, which was turning out to be the least practical garment imaginable for a stroll at five hundred metres.

  Gasping, he looked round again.

  Xin had vanished.

  Onward, he thought. How far to the bridge now? Twenty-five metres, thirty? At the most. Get moving! Make sure that you round that corner. Get to safety. Who cares what Xin is doing?

  He took heart and walked on, arms stretched for balance, master of himself once more, when he heard the noise.

  The noise.

  It was something between a rattle and a hum, following a heavy metallic clunk. It drew away in the other direction. It froze the blood in Grand Cherokee’s veins, although it was a noise he knew well, a noise he heard every day he spent up here at work.

  Xin had woken the Dragon.

  He had started the ride!

  A scream of fear broke out of him, that was torn away by the warm gusts and scattered over Pudong. Whimpering, he clambered on as fast as he could. His ears told him that the train had just passed the northern pillar, then he saw it climbing the slope through the great gap. At the moment the dragon was still moving slowly, but once it got to the roof it would pick up speed, and then—

  He crawled forward like a mad thing in the shadow of the southern pillar. The tilt on the tracks was becoming more pronounced, so that he had no choice but to move ahead on all fours.

  Too slow. Too slow!

  The fear will burst your heart, thought the detached part of Grand Cherokee. Try cursing.

  It helped.

  He screamed hell and damnation into the deep blue sky, his voice cracking, grabbed hold of the warm metal of the track and hopped rather than crept forward. The rails had begun to thrum. Twice he nearly lost his balance and fell off the curve, but each time he caught himself and worked his way stubbornly onward. High above him a hollow whistling sound signalled that the carriages had reached their highest point and were now on the flat stretch up above, and he still had not reached his goal. Trying to catch sight of the dragon, he saw only himself reflected in the mirrored glass on the pillar façade, somehow looking damn good, like a movie hero. All in all he should have been having the time of his life here, but there was the nagging question of the happy ending, the fact that the dragon had just passed the catapult.

  The rails began to vibrate mightily. Grand Cherokee clambered onward, choking out the word ‘Please!’ over and over like a mantra, ‘Please, please, please—’ in sync with the thrumming of the rail.

  ‘Please—’ – Raddangg – ‘Please—’ – Raddangg—

  He came round the pillar. He could see the steel bridge not ten metres in front of him, leading from the rails to the wall of the building.

  The dragon swept down from the roof.

  ‘Please—’

  The train hurtled down, thunderous, deafening, into the depths, then coiled in on itself in the loop and shot upwards. The whole structure was moving, shaking. The rails seemed to dance to and fro before Grand Cherokee’s eyes. He stood up, managed to leap across several spars at once and keep his balance despite the tilt.

  Five metres. Four.

  The dragon rushed down in the loop.

  Three metres.

  – shot round the corner—

  Two.

  – flew towards him.

  In the moment that the train crossed the point where the bridge led off, Grand Cherokee did the impossible, a superhuman feat. Howling wildly, he leapt clear, an enormous standing jump. The sharp bow of the front carriage passed below him. He stretched out his arms to grab hold of one of the seats, touched something, lost his grip. His body smashed into the backs of the seats in the next row, was flung high, pirouetted and for a moment seemed to be heading into the deep blue sky, as though he had decided to reach outer space.

  Then he fell.

  The last thing that went through Grand Cherokee’s head was that he had at least tried.

  That he hadn’t been so bad after all.

  * * *

  Xin craned his head. High above him he could see people going into the glass viewing platform. The corridor would be opened soon as well. Time to get going. He knew how things worked in high-rise surveillance control rooms, he knew that hardly anybody would have glanced at the monitors in the last quarter of an hour. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have seen much. Leaving aside the two moments when Wang had suddenly dropped to the control room floor, they had been standing close beside one another most of the time. Two close friends having a chat.

  But now he had set the dragon moving. Before the usual time. That would be noticed. He had to get out of here.

  Xin hesitated.

  Then he quickly wiped his fingerprints from the display with his sleeve, paused, and also wiped the places where Grand Cherokee had fumbled about with his greasy fingers. Otherwise those blasted smears would haunt his dreams. There were some things that tended to cling to the inside of Xin’s skull like leeches. Lastly, he hurried along the corridor and left it the way they had come. In the lift he peeled the wig from his head, took off his glasses, tore the moustache from his upper lip and turned his jacket inside out. It had been made specially for him, reversible. The grey jacket became sandy beige, and he stuffed the wig, beard and glasses inside. He decided to change lifts in the Sky Lobby on the twenty-eighth floor, then went down to the basement, through the shopping mall and out into the bright sunshine. Outside he saw people running towards the south side of the building. Cries went up. Somebody shouted that there had been a suicide.

  Suicide? All okay then.

  As Xin walked onward, faster, under the trees in the park, he took out the detective’s card.

  27 May 2025

  PHANTOMS

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

  Julian set great store by his inventive genius that generated so many extraordinary ideas, and in particular by the fact that he could simply choose to switch the thinking process on and off. If unsolved problems tried to join him under the covers, he chose to sleep, and was wafted away on the wings of slumber as soon as his head touched the pillow. Sleep was a cornerstone of his mental and physical health, and up until now, he had always slept excellently well on the Moon.

  Just not tonight.

  The discussion at dinner was going round and round in his head like the horses on a merry-go-round; more precisely, Walo Ögi’s remark asking why he didn’t simply announce a divorce with Washington and declare that his technologies were up for sale to all comers, offering global access. It was true that there was a difference between taking the best offer and taking every offer. There was, even, a moral distinction. Playing favourites when it came to the wellbeing of ten billion people laid him open to charges of perfidious profiteering, even if not every one of these ten billion was in a position to build a space elevator in the front garden – charges that were unpalatable to a man who outdid all others in arguing for his autonomy as a businessman, who made speeches about global responsibility and the destructive effects of rivalry.

  Tonight Julian lay awake because he saw all his private thoughts and arguments confirmed once more. Especially since, aside from all moral considerations, to make his patents generally available would not only boost economic activity on the Moon, it would also mean better business for him. The Swiss investor had put his finger on it: if another three or four nations had a s
pace elevator, and were mining helium-3, the global switch to aneutronic fusion would be complete within a few years. Orley Enterprises, or more exactly Orley Space, could help the less wealthy countries with finance to build their elevators, which would give Orley Fusion the chance to acquire exclusive concessions for their power network. The reactor business would turn a profit and Orley Energy would become the biggest power provider on the planet. He would just have to deal with the fact that Washington would be less than happy about all this.

  But it was a little more complicated than that.

  Zheng Pang-Wang had tried several times to woo him for Beijing, which Julian had flatly refused until one occasion when they were having lunch together at Hakkasan, the exclusive Chinese restaurant in London, and Julian realised that he would only be betraying his American partners if he jumped into bed with one other trading partner. If on the other hand he offered his goods to everybody, this would effectively be the same as offering everybody in the world a Toyota or a Big Mac. Obviously Washington would see things a little differently. They would argue that they had signed a deal based on mutual advantage, a deal where – to continue the fast food metaphor – he supplied the burger while the government provided the bun, since neither could act on their own without the other’s support.

  In a sudden fit of chattiness, he had shared his thoughts with Zheng.

  The old fellow nearly dropped his chopsticks.

  ‘No, no, no, honourable friend! You may have a wife and a concubine. Does the concubine want to change anything about the fact that you are married? Not at all. She’s happy to share this pleasant way of life with the wife, but she will very quickly lose all taste for this at the thought you may take other mistresses. China has invested too much. We observe regretfully but respectfully that you feel obliged to your lawful partner, but if space elevators were suddenly to sprout up like beanstalks all over, and everybody were to stake a claim on the Moon, that would be a problem of a different magnitude. Beijing would be most concerned.’

  Most concerned.

  ‘There’s only one problem, Julian. How to stay alive after such a change of direction.’

  Rogachev’s remark had irked him since it showed once more how arrogant governments and their organs were. Useless mob. What kind of globalisation was this where the players didn’t even seem to want to peek at the other guy’s hand, where if you tried to give everybody an equal slice of the pie you ran the risk of being murdered? The longer he considered the matter, the higher the flood of biochemical stimulants to his thalamus, until at last, a little after five o’clock, he had had enough of tossing and turning in his bedclothes. He took a shower, and decided to use this unaccustomed attack of sleeplessness to take a stroll out in the canyon. In fact, he was dog-tired, physically at least, but nevertheless he went into the living room, put on shorts and T-shirt, yawned and shoved his feet into some light slippers.

  As he raised his head, he thought he saw a movement at the far left of the window, something flitting at the edge of his vision.

  He stared out at the canyon.

  Nothing there.

  He hesitated, indecisive, then shrugged and left the suite. Nobody about. Why would there be? Everybody was exhausted, deep asleep. He went to the locker with the spacesuits and began to dress, wriggled into the narrow, steel-reinforced harness, put on the chestplate and backpack, held his helmet under his elbow and went down to the basement.

  As he went into the corridor, he thought for a moment he was hallucinating.

  An astronaut was coming towards him from the train station.

  Julian blinked. The other man drew nearer fast, carried along by the conveyor. White light limned his outlines. Suddenly he had the crazy feeling that he was looking at a mirror-world, that he saw himself there at the other end of the corridor, then a familiar face came into focus, oval head with hair cropped short, strong chin, dark eyes.

  ‘Carl,’ he called out, astonished.

  Hanna seemed no less surprised.

  ‘What are you doing down here?’ He stepped off the belt and walked slowly towards Julian, who lifted his eyebrows, unsettled, and peered about as though more early risers might step out of the walls.

  ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘Tchh, well, to be honest—’ A furtive look showed in Hanna’s eyes, and his smile slipped, becoming foolish. ‘I—’

  ‘Just don’t tell me that you went outside!’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Hanna lifted his hands. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘But you wanted to.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Go on, say it.’

  ‘Well, yes. To take a walk. I wanted to go over to the other side of the canyon, look at Gaia from over there.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Of course on my own!’ Hanna dropped the schoolboy affectations and put on a grown-up face. ‘You know me. I’m not the type for eight hours of sleep, could even be I’m not house-trained for group trips like this. At any rate, I was lying there in bed and I suddenly wondered what it would be like to be the only person on the Moon. How it would feel to walk around out there without the others. Imagine there was no one here but me.’

  ‘That’s a half-baked idea.’

  ‘Could be yours, though.’ Hanna rolled his eyes. ‘C’mon, don’t be like that. I mean, over the next few days we’re going to be wandering about in herds, aren’t we? And that’s fine, really. I like the others, I won’t go walkabout. But I just wanted to know how it would be.’

  Julian ran his fingertips through his beard.

  ‘Well, it looks as though I don’t really have to worry,’ he grinned. ‘You’ve already got lost before you could even set foot outside.’

  ‘Yes, that was dumb of me, wasn’t it?’ Hanna laughed. ‘I forgot where the darned airlocks are! I know, you guys showed us, but—’

  ‘Here. Right up ahead.’

  Hanna turned his head.

  ‘Well, that’s great,’ he said, downcast. ‘It says so in big fat letters.’

  ‘Some lone wolf you are,’ Julian said mockingly. ‘As it happens, I was about to do just the same.’

  ‘What, just go out on your own?’

  ‘No, you fool, I have a great deal of practical experience which you don’t. This isn’t just a morning jog! It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Sure. Life’s dangerous.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Give me a break, Julian, I know my way around a spacesuit! I had an EVA on the OSS, I had one on the flight here, all of that is more dangerous than taking a hike out here on the regolith.’

  ‘That’s true, but—’ But I snuck out the same way you did, thought Julian. ‘Regulations say that nobody goes out on their own. None of the tourists anyway.’

  ‘Fine and dandy,’ said Hanna cheerfully. ‘Now there’s two of us. Unless of course you’d rather go out alone.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Julian laughed. He went to the airlock and opened the inner door. ‘You were found out, so that means you have to come along with me, like it or not.’

  Hanna followed him. The airlock was built to take twenty people, so they were rather dwarfed by its dimensions as they stood there letting their suits run through diagnostics. Bemused, he worried away at the question of just how unlikely this meeting was, mathematically speaking. If it were true that a person lives in just one of countless parallel universes where every possible course of events is true somewhere: almost identical worlds, radically different worlds with intelligent dinosaurs or where Hitler had won the war, then why did he have to live in the world where Julian had turned up in the corridor at exactly the same time as him? Why not ten minutes later, giving him the chance to get back to his suite unnoticed? The only consolation was that there were other realities where things had turned out even worse, where Julian had actually seen him arrive on the Lunar Express. At least he seemed not to have noticed that at all.

  He would have to be more careful, pay more attention.

  He, and Ebola.


  Xintiandi, Shanghai, China

  ‘Interesting, that program of yours,’ said Jericho.

  ‘Ah!’ Tu looked pleased. ‘I was wondering when you would call. Which one did you try out?’

  ‘French Concession. You’re not seriously going to put that on the market, are you?’

  ‘We’ve drawn its sting.’ Tu grinned. ‘As I told you, that was a prototype. Strictly for internal use, so please don’t go peddling it. I thought that you would appreciate the jokes, and you also wanted to get to know Yoyo.’

  ‘Was that her idea? Taking swipes at the Party.’

  ‘The whole script is Yoyo’s. They’re test recordings, she was mostly improvising. Did you try chatting her up?’

  ‘I did. Chatting her up, and calling her names.’

  Tu giggled. ‘It’s impressive, isn’t it?’

  ‘A few more responses to choose from wouldn’t hurt. Otherwise, very successful.’

  ‘The market-ready version runs on an artificial intelligence. It can generate any response instantly. We didn’t even need to film Yoyo to get them, any more than we needed sound recordings. The synthesiser can simulate her voice, her lip movements, gestures, everything really. Your version is very much simpler, but it means you get unadulterated Yoyo.’