Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Good. Locate where the text was sent from.’

  ‘Of course.’ The computer gave him the coordinates. Jericho is astonished. He hadn’t expected it would be so easy to track back the route the message took. He would have thought that Yoyo would lay a few more false trails when communicating.

  ‘Are you sure that you haven’t just found an intermediary browser?’

  ‘One hundred per cent sure, Owen. The message was sent from there at 6.24 local time on the morning of 24th May.’

  Jericho nods. That’s good. That’s very good!

  And his hope becomes a certainty.

  Forgotten World

  As Jericho steered his COD along the Huaihai Donglu towards the elway, he went over his conclusions from last night once more.

  Hi all. Back in our galaxy now, have been for a few days.

  Which could mean, I’ve been back in Quyu for a few days. Obvious. Not so clear though why Yoyo would call Quyu a galaxy. More likely that she meant one particular place in Quyu.

  Was really stressed out these last days, is anybody harshing on me?

  Stress. Well, obviously.

  And why would anybody be angry at her? That was also fairly easily told. Yoyo wasn’t actually asking a question here, she was giving an explanation. That somebody had tracked her down, that this someone was dangerous, and that she didn’t know whom she was dealing with.

  Couldn’t help it, really truly. All happened so fast. Shit.

  More difficult. She had taken flight at panic speed. But what did the first part mean? What couldn’t she help?

  Even so quickly you can be forgotten.

  Trivially easy. Quyu, the forgotten world. Almost a platitude. Yoyo must have been in a hurry to get the message out.

  Only waiting now for the old demons to visit me once more.

  Even easier: City Demons, you know where I am.

  Yeah, and, I’m busy writing new songs. If any of the band asks: We’ll make an appearance once I’ve got a few euphonious lyrics on the go. Let’s prog!

  Which was as much as to say, I’m trying to get the problems under control as fast as I can. Until then, we’ll disappear.

  And who is we?

  The Guardians.

  The city freeway ran at an angle to Jericho’s route. An eight-lane road with enough traffic on it for sixteen, and with several storeys of elevated highway soaring above. Cars, buses and vans crawled through the morning as though through aspic. Hundreds of thousands of commuters flooded into the city from the satellite towns, taxi drivers glowered out at the world around. Not even bikers found a spot where they could squeeze through here. They all wore breathing-masks, but nevertheless you expected to see them turn blue and slump from their saddles. Even though there were more fuel-cell cars in use in the metropolises of China than anywhere else in the world, more hydrogen motors and more electric engines, a blanket of smoggy exhaust fumes lay over the city.

  A special traffic track ran high above everything else. It was supported by slender telescopic legs, had only been opened for use a few years ago and was reserved exclusively for CODs. Now COD tracks connected all the most important points in the city and led out to the commuter towns and the coast, some of them at dizzying heights. Jericho threaded his way onto the steep sliproad, waited for his vehicle to click into place on the rails and entered his destination coordinates. From now on he didn’t need to steer the COD, which would have been impossible anyway. As soon as CODs were in the system, the driver played no further part.

  Jericho’s COD climbed up the slope in a row of identical machines. Up on the track, he could see countless numbers of the cabin-like vehicles racing away at more than 300 kilometres per hour, gleaming silver in the sun. One storey down, any sort of movement had ceased.

  He leaned back.

  The vehicles approaching in the outside lane braked just enough to leave a precisely measured gap for his vehicle to slip into. Jericho loved the moment of rapid acceleration when the COD took off. He was pressed briefly against the back of his seat, then he had reached cruising speed. His phone told him that he had received a message from the computer. The display scanned his iris. An additional voice-print check wasn’t really necessary, but Jericho liked to make assurance doubly sure.

  ‘Owen Jericho,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Owen.’

  ‘Hello, Diane.’

  ‘I’ve analysed the writing on Yoyo’s shirt. Would you like to see the result?’

  He had given the computer this job before he set off. He linked his phone to the interface on the car dashboard.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It’s evidently a symbol.’

  A large A appeared on the COD monitor. At least, Jericho supposed that it was supposed to be an A. The crossbar was missing, although in its place a ragged ring slanted around the letter instead. Underneath he could read four letters, NDRO.

  ‘Have you looked for similar symbols on the net?’

  ‘Yes. What you see is the result of image enhancement. It’s a reconstruction based on high-probability matches. The symbol doesn’t turn up anywhere in the data store. The letters might be an abbreviation, or a word fragment. I’ve found NDRO as an abbreviation several times, just not in China.’

  ‘What word do you reckon it might be?’

  ‘My favourites are androgynous, android, Andromeda.’

  ‘Thank you, Diane.’ Jericho thought for a moment. ‘Can you see whether I left the bedroom window open?’

  ‘It’s open.’

  ‘Shut it, please.’

  ‘Shall do, Owen.’

  The COD alerted him that it would leave the track in a few seconds. It had taken only four minutes to travel almost twenty kilometres. Jericho took his phone from the interface. The COD slowed, drew out and threaded into the queue of cars that were leaving the network just before Quyu. He made fairly good speed down the turn-off and onto the main road. Even here, far outside the city centre, the traffic flowed sluggishly, but at least it was moving. Quyu was separated from the city by several storeys of freeway. Streets leading out were bundled together by roadblocks and fed through pinch points, with a police station near every one. There were also army barracks to the east and west. For all that, only a very few people in Quyu could even afford a car or the COD hire fee, so that metro lines and trolley-buses connected the district to the city.

  The Demon workshop was just outside Xaxu in a historic quarter, not two kilometres west of here. It was one of the last of the really old quarters. Earlier it had been a village, or a small country town, and sooner or later it would have to give way to the phalanxes of anonymous modern houses. Now that the downtown had been completely remodelled, the planners were having a go at the periphery.

  Only Quyu would stay untouched, as ever.

  Fast though he had got here on the COD track, it was painfully slow getting to the part of town he wanted to go. It was a typical old-style neighbourhood. Stone buildings, one to three storeys high, with black and dark red gables, lined busy streets where many little alleys branched off, and courtyards opened up. There were open shopfronts and food sellers lurked under colourful awnings, and washing lines stretched between the houses. The Demon Point workshop took up the whole ground floor of a rust-streaked house with a gap-toothed wooden balcony around its first floor. Some windowpanes were missing, others were crazed and blind.

  Jericho parked the COD in a side street and strolled across to the workshop. Several handsome hybrids and e-bikes were lined up in front of other, less attractive specimens. There was nobody to be seen until a thin boy in shorts and a baggy T-shirt smeared with oil came out from a tiny office and got to work on one of the e-bikes with a rag and a tin of polish.

  ‘Hello,’ said Jericho.

  The boy looked up briefly and turned back to his work. Jericho squatted down next to him.

  ‘Very nice bike.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘I can see how you’re polishing it. Are you on
e of the ones who cleaned the NKs’ clocks as well, in the DKD Club?’

  The kid grinned and kept on polishing.

  ‘That was Daxiong.’

  ‘Good work he did.’

  ‘He told the wankers to shut their traps. Even though there were more of them. Said that he didn’t feel like listening to their fascist crap.’

  ‘I hope he didn’t get any trouble from them.’

  ‘Little bit.’ The boy seemed only now to realise that he’d fallen into conversation with somebody he didn’t know at all. He put down his rag and looked at Jericho distrustfully. ‘Who are you anyway?’

  ‘Ahh, I was just headed for Quyu. Sheer chance that I spotted your workshop here. And given that I’d read that blog post – Well, I thought, since I’m here anyway—’

  ‘Interested in a bike?’

  Jericho stood up. He looked where the boy was pointing. Over at the back of the workshop, a burly chopper, an electro, was up on its chocks. The rear wheel was missing.

  ‘Why not?’ He walked over to the machine and admired it ostentatiously. ‘Been thinking for years of getting a chopper. Lithium-aluminium battery?’

  ‘That’s right. It’ll give you 280.’

  ‘Range?’

  ‘Four hundred kilometres. Minimum. Are you from downtown?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘That’s hell for cars. You should think about it.’

  ‘Shall do.’ Jericho took out his phone. ‘I don’t know my way around here, sadly. I’m supposed to meet someone, but you know how Quyu is for addresses. Maybe you can help me.’

  The kid shrugged. Jericho projected the A with the hazy ring around it onto the back wall of the workshop. The boy’s eyes gave him away – he knew the place.

  ‘That’s where you want to go?’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Not really. You just have to—’

  ‘Button your lip,’ said somebody behind him.

  Jericho turned around and stared at a chest that began somewhere in the southeast and ended further along to the north-east. Way up above the chest there had to be something that the brute used to think. He put his head back and made out a shaven skull, with eyes so narrow that it was hard to believe he could see through them. A blue appliqué on the chin looked vaguely like a pharaoh’s beard. The leather jacket was open at the front, and beneath it he could see the City Demons logo.

  ‘It’s fine.’ The boy looked upwards, uncertain. ‘He was just asking where—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything’s okay.’ Jericho smiled. ‘I wanted to know whether—’

  ‘What? What do you want to know?’

  The man-mountain made no attempt to bend down to talk to him, which would have made conversation considerably easier. Jericho took a step back and turned his projector to the wall again.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve come at a bad moment. I’m looking for an address.’

  ‘An address?’ The other man turned his massive head and looked – as far as Jericho could tell – at the projected image.

  ‘I mean, is that even an address at all?’ Jericho asked. ‘I’ve only got—’

  ‘Who gave you that?’

  ‘Someone who didn’t have much time to give me directions. Someone from Quyu. Someone I want to help.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘Social problems.’

  ‘Is there anyone in Quyu who doesn’t have those?’

  ‘True enough.’ Jericho decided not to take this treatment any longer. ‘What now? I don’t want to keep this person waiting.’

  ‘He’s also interested in the chopper!’ added the boy, in a tone that suggested he had already talked Jericho into buying the machine for an enormous sum.

  The man-mountain pursed his lips.

  Then he smiled.

  The suspicion melted sheer away from his features, making way for warm friendship. An enormous paw swooped through space and landed with a playful smack on Jericho’s shoulder.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so right away?’

  That had broken the ice. His suddenly hearty manner didn’t yield any more information though, but rather a detailed description of all the chopper’s supposed virtues, and he reached a genial crescendo as he named an exorbitant price. The ogre even managed to price the missing rear wheel separately.

  Jericho nodded and nodded. At the end, he shook his head.

  ‘No?’ said the giant, surprised.

  ‘Not at that price.’

  ‘Fine. Name your price.’

  ‘I’ll give you another idea. An A with a frayed ring around it and four mysterious letters beneath. You remember? I go there, I come back. Then we do business.’

  The giant wrinkled his brow laboriously. He was thinking, Jericho had to assume. Then he described a route which seemed to run the whole length and breadth of Quyu.

  What had the kid said just now? Not really far?

  ‘And what do the letters mean?’

  ‘NDRO?’ The giant laughed. ‘This friend of yours must really have been in a hurry. It’s Andromeda.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘It’s a live concert venue.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Your knowledge of Quyu seems to rest on the very slightest acquaintance, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  Jericho had to raise his eyebrows. He would never have expected that a man-mountain like this, with such a tough-looking skull, would produce such a refined turn of phrase.

  ‘It’s true, I hardly know the place.’

  ‘Then take care of yourself.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll see you later, umm – May I ask your name?’

  A grin spread across the huge face.

  ‘Daxiong. Just Daxiong.’

  Aha. Six Koreans had come away with injuries. Slowly, the story was becoming clearer.

  Jericho had never been in Quyu before. He had no idea what was lying in wait for him when he drove through beneath the freeway. But in fact nothing happened. Quyu didn’t begin at any clearly marked spot, at least not in this part. It simply just – began. With rows of low-built houses like the ones he had just left. Hardly any shops as such, but instead street vendors cheek by jowl, who had spread out onto their sheets and carpets anything that seemed saleable and couldn’t run away. A woman in a rickety rattan chair, dozing in the shadow of a jury-rigged canopy, a basket of aubergines in front of her. A shopper took two of these, put money in her apron and went on without waking her. Old people chatting, some in pyjamas, others bare-chested. Jostling crowds on crumbling pavements. Criss-crossing the street, overhead, the flapping banners of washing hung out to dry, smocks and shirts waving their sleeves at one another whenever the wind found its way between the houses. Murmurs, chatting and shouting, melodic, booming, shrill or low, all woven together into a cacophony. Cheap pedal-bikes everywhere, clawing at the nerves, squeaking and rattling, the thud of hammers and the whine of drills, the sounds of running repairs, maintenance of the make-do-and-mend school. Some traders spotted Jericho’s head of blond hair, leapt to their feet and yelled ‘Looka, looka!’ across the street, waving handbags, watches, sculptures; he ignored them, concentrating on not running anyone over. In Shanghai, downtown Shanghai, traffic was a state of war. Lorries hunted buses, buses chased cars which chased bikes, and all of them together had sworn death to all pedestrians. In Quyu it was less aggressive, but that made it no better. Rather than attacking one another, road users simply ignored one another. Folk who had just now been haggling over chickens or kitchen-ware would hop down into the road, or stand there in little knots, debating the weather, the price of groceries, their families’ health.

  With every street he went down, Jericho saw fewer traders aiming at the tourist market. The goods offered for sale became poorer. As the number of cars on the street dropped, there were more and more pedestrians and bicycles, and the throng thinned out. More and more often he saw half-demolished houses, their missing walls meagrely patched with cardboard and corrugated iron, al
l of them inhabited. In between, years and years of rubble. A cluster of grey and dull blue modular blocks appeared at the side of the road as though cast carelessly down like dice, arthritic trees twisted double in front of them, the randomly parked cars dating back to the days when Deng Xiaoping had proclaimed the economic miracle which had never quite taken place in this part of China.

  All of a sudden it was dark around him.

  The deeper Jericho went into the heart of Quyu, the less clearly structured it became. Every possible style of architecture seemed to have been thrown on the heap here. High-rise blocks abandoned halfway alternated with derelict low-rises and silos several storeys high, their hideousness emphasised by the peeling remains of several colours of paint. Jericho was most moved by the pathetic attempts to make the uninhabitable look like a habitation. There was something almost like an architectural vernacular going on here in the tangle of hand-built shacks, most little more than posts rammed into the ground and covered over with tarpaulin. At least there was life here, while the silos looked like post-atomic tombs.

  In the midst of a wasteland of rubbish he stopped and looked at women and children loading whatever they thought they could use onto barrows. Whole swathes here looked as though once-intact city blocks had been pulverised by bombing raids. He tried to remember what he knew about districts like these. A number that he had noticed somewhere flitted through his mind. In 2025, there were one and a half billion people living in slums worldwide. Twenty years before it had been one billion. Every year, twenty or thirty million came to join them. A new arrival in the slums had to fight his way up bizarre hierarchies, where those on the lowest rung collected trash and made from it whatever they could sell or trade. According to Daxiong’s description, he would need at least another hour to get to the Andromeda. He drove on, thought of the quarter he had wound up living in years ago, shortly before it had been torn down to make room for the development where Yoyo lived. At the time he hadn’t been able to understand why the residents were so attached to their ruins. He understood that they had no choice, except that some of them could have taken up the offer of being relocated in relatively luxurious apartments outside Shanghai, with running water, baths and toilets, lifts and electricity.