Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Well, you didn’t go pop straight away.

  But their own mothers wouldn’t have recognised the corpses.

  * * *

  Dana Lawrence looked up as Lynn came into the control room. She glanced at the clock. There were a few minutes yet before feeding time, and she had to go down to the basement for a routine check. Normally Ashwini Anand would take over in the control room while she was away, but she was just now looking into why the robot had failed to change the sheets in the Nairs’ suite.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Lynn asked.

  ‘So far, yes. There’s been a tech failure up on level twenty-seven, nothing important.’

  Lynn’s eyes flickered. It was enough to trigger Dana’s analytical turn of mind. She wondered what was wrong with Julian’s daughter. More and more, she was showing signs of uncertainty, irritability. Why had she so vehemently refused to show Julian the footage two days ago? She looked at Lynn searchingly, but the woman had pulled herself together by now.

  ‘Can you manage, Dana?’

  ‘No problem. Look, since you happen to be here, could I ask you for a favour? I have to go downstairs for ten minutes. There’ll be nobody in the control room during that time, and—’

  ‘Just route it all through your phone.’

  ‘I do, usually. It’s just I’d like to keep an eye on everything when it all gets going in the restaurant. Could you take over for a while?’

  ‘Of course.’ Lynn smiled. ‘Go on then, never fear.’

  You’re acting, Dana thought. What are you hiding? What’s your problem?

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘See you soon.’

  * * *

  The control room. Little Olympus.

  There were so many buttons you could press here, systems you could reprogram, settings and parameters you could shift. Increase the oxygen level until everything burst into flame. Mix in a lethal level of carbon dioxide. Shut all the bulkheads and lock away the restaurant party until they all went mad, one after another. Pump the sludge into the drinking water so that everyone fell ill. Stop the lifts. Unplug the reactor. Increase the internal air pressure and then shunt it all out in one. All kinds of fun you could have. There were no limits to creativity here.

  I am dangerous.

  Lynn’s eyes drifted across the wall of monitors, all the areas under surveillance.

  No. You are not your thoughts!‘

  I am what I am,’ she sang softly.

  Another tune joined in. A call from London, Orley headquarters, Central Security. Lynn frowned. Her hand hovered indecisively over the touchscreen, then she took the call, feeling queasy. Edda Hoff’s face appeared on the screen, with her pageboy cut. Her mask-like features gave no clue as to whether she had good news or bad to report.

  ‘Hello, Lynn,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better! The trip’s a complete success. And down there? Body count? Armageddon?’

  Hoff took worryingly long to reply.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘A few hours ago someone got in touch with us. A certain Tu Tian, a Chinese businessman, currently in Berlin. He had a rather convoluted story to tell us. Apparently he and some friends of his have ended up in possession of restricted information, and since then they’ve been on somebody’s hit list.’

  ‘And what does that have to do with us?’

  ‘The text that caused all this kerfuffle is very broken up. There are only fragments, but from the little that they’ve been able to send us it doesn’t read much like a bedtime story.’

  ‘What is it, exactly?’

  ‘I’ll send it over to you.’

  A few lines of text appeared on a separate screen. Lynn read the text, read it again, then once more, hoping that the name Orley might perhaps vanish, but it just seemed to grow bigger every time she read it. She stared at the document, paralysed, and felt a black wave of panic roll towards her as though the conversation with ISLAND-II had never taken place.

  Nobody there suspects everything.

  And?’ Hoff urged her. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s a fragment, as you say.’ Just don’t show any uncertainty! ‘A puzzle. As long as we don’t have the full text, we may perhaps be reading more into it than is really there.’

  ‘Tu is worried that there will be an attack on Gaia.’

  ‘That’s going a bit far, don’t you think?’

  ‘Depends how you look at it.’

  ‘There’s nothing here to tell us when this operation is even going to take place.’

  ‘That’s what I told him. On the other hand, we can’t simply ignore what’s going on.’

  ‘What is going on though, Edda? To decide whether or not you’re going to ignore something, you need to know what it is, don’t you? But we just don’t know. Orley has interests worldwide: if there really is something planned against us, it doesn’t necessarily have to be aimed at Gaia. How did this Chinese gentleman get that idea?’

  ‘Because the reports are in all the newspapers.’

  ‘I see.’ Her thoughts raced. The edges of the room seemed to be blurring and fading. ‘Well, that’s true, the hotel is certainly most in the news, but that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s most at risk. At any rate, we really can’t afford any upset up here at the moment – you do understand that, don’t you, Edda? Not with these guests! There’s no way we can risk scaring away potential investors with this sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t want to scare anyone away,’ Hoff said, somewhat indignantly. ‘I’m doing my job.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Apart from which, I didn’t want to bother you about it, I thought I would speak to Dana Lawrence, but you just happened to pick up. And I’m not daft, Lynn. I know that you’ve got a crowd of investors up there, all very important people, ultra-rich, famous faces. But isn’t that exactly what might suggest that the hotel is in some sort of danger?’

  Lynn kept quiet.

  ‘Be all that as it may,’ she said in the end, ‘you did the right thing telling us so quickly. We’ll keep our eyes open up here, and you should do the same. Stay alert. Have you already talked to Norrington and Jennifer Shaw?’

  ‘No. First of all I checked out this character Tu.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A self-made millionaire from the first wave. Extremely successful. He runs a high-tech holography and virtual environments outfit in Shanghai. I found a few interviews and articles about him. Definitely not a nutcase.’

  ‘Good. Stick with it. Tell me if there are any developments, and – Edda?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Speak to me first if anything happens.’

  ‘I’ll have to tell Norrington and Jennifer as well of course—’

  ‘Certainly you shall. Until then, Edda.’

  Lynn ended the call and stared dead ahead. A few minutes later Dana came up from the basement levels. She got up, smiled and wished the director good evening, without breathing a word about the call. She left the control room at a steady pace, took the lift up to Gaia’s curved bosom, squirmed into her suite as soon as the door slid open and dashed into the bathroom. She tore open the packet of green tablets and gulped down three of them, and even as she choked them down she was wrestling with a dark glass jar full of little capsules the size and shape of maggots.

  It slipped through her fingers. Fell.

  She snatched and caught it. Two little maggots crept out into the palm of her violently quivering hand. She shoved them hurriedly between her lips and washed them down with water. When she raised her head there was a Gorgon staring at her, a fearsome face with serpent hair; she wouldn’t have felt surprised if she’d turned to stone on the spot. She was gripped tight by the feeling that she was falling, and that the fall would never end. The stuff wasn’t working, not fast enough, she was rushing onward, headlong into madness, she would go mad if it didn’t work, mad, mad—

 
Sobbing, she ran into the living room, forgot the lesser gravity for a moment, slammed straight into the wall and fell on her back. Helpfully, she ended up where she had wanted to be anyway, even if not quite like this, but what the hell. There it was, the minibar, right in front of her nose. Cola, water, juice, everything out, there had to be a bottle of red wine here somewhere, or even better the whisky, the little emergency ration that she had smuggled in, even though you weren’t supposed to drink alcohol up on the Moon, blah blah blah, get it down, neck it—

  The bourbon burned her throat as it went down. She crept back to the bathroom on all fours as her ribcage quivered from the coming eruption. She just made it to the toilet, clutched the sides of the bowl and spewed out a jet of whisky, tablets and whatever else was in her stomach. The vomit splattered against the ceramic in front of her, and some of it splashed back onto her face. Where were the tablets? A sour stench assailed her nose, brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t see anything. She retched again, although there was nothing left to bring up, until at last she could wrench herself away from the toilet bowl and collapse beside it. Whimpering, motionless, she lay there bathed in sweat and vomit, staring at the ceiling – and all at once she could breathe again.

  Tim. ISLAND-II had said that she should talk to Tim. Where was he? At dinner? Had they already started? It’s twenty past eight, you silly cow, of course they’ve started, a quick hello from the kitchen staff, fripperies of foam and essence and whatever damn thing those fools served up; anything she ate would come straight up again, but she had to go there, she couldn’t stay lying here for ever could she, somebody would come and break the door down.

  Fear is a physical phenomenon.

  Oh how true, you clever-clogs machine, you Socrates!

  All these physical symptoms together make you give your thoughts such weight, Lynn, that’s why they have such horrible power over you.

  She sat up carefully. Something buzzed and boomed inside her skull. She felt as though she had lain in the baking Sahara sun for a year, but she could still think straight, and her nerves slowly settled back down from the hideous shock that had set them thrumming. She climbed to her feet like an old woman, and looked at herself in the mirror.

  ‘God, you look like shit,’ she murmured.

  As soon as you manage to relax you’ll be able to break the spiral. The more intensely you feel yourself, the less power your thoughts have to torture you.

  Well then. They’d just have to eat the first course without her. What she saw in the mirror there couldn’t be fixed with just a bit of blusher. She would have to retouch, for sure, but she’d be able to do that too. Then she would turn up in the Selene just in time for the main course, glowing and beautiful, the queen of concealment.

  A succubus dressed as an angel.

  Berlin, Germany

  Tu insisted on an evening’s entertainment once he had shot off messages to all and sundry, hoping to get some inside information about the Zheng Group. Some of the people he wrote to were already lying in their beds in Shanghai or Beijing at this time of day, while others were in America – these he either spoke with, or he left a message asking them to call him back. He quipped that at the end of the day, any information he could get about Zheng from America was going to be better than anything from China.

  ‘Why’s that?’ Jericho asked, as they were served their Wiener schnitzel in the legendary Restaurant Borchardt.

  ‘Why?’ Tu raised his eyebrows. ‘America is our best friend!’

  ‘That’s right,’ Yoyo said. ‘Whenever we Chinese want to know anything about China, we ask America.’

  ‘Fine friends you have,’ Jericho remarked. ‘That friendship of yours makes the rest of the world quake in their boots.’

  ‘Oh, Owen, come on now. Really.’

  ‘Seriously! Didn’t you say yourself that the Moon crisis was as bad as the Cuban crisis?’

  Tu lifted up his schnitzel with his knife where it spilled over the edge of the plate, and peered doubtfully underneath, as though perhaps he might find something there to explain why Europeans didn’t cut their meat into bite-sized morsels like civilised folk. He would rather have gone to a Chinese restaurant, but he had given way in the face of a dual chorus of ‘You cannot be serious!’

  ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘And I was as worried sick about it as you were. But you just have to remember that China and America simply can’t go to war. They are the twin giants of the global economy, and they might be at odds but they’re joined at the hip. Traditionally, arch-enemies have always done the best deals, there are advantages to not actually liking the guy you’re doing business with. If you like your trading partner, deals are guaranteed to go wobbly, but antipathy puts you on your guard. That’s why China does so extraordinarily well when it trades with the nations it likes least of all, meaning the USA and Japan. Of course, if I wanted to know something about America, naturally I would get in touch with the Zhong Chan Er Bu.’

  ‘That’s all a heap of platitudes.’ Jericho began to eat. ‘The idea that the citizens of totalitarian regimes can find out most about themselves if they ask the people whose job it is to spy on them. We’re talking about something else. Even the Americans can’t peer into Zheng Pang-Wang’s mind.’

  ‘True. It’s still worth asking the CIA and the NSA though, if you want to know something about him. Or for my money you could ask the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the SIS, or the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or Mossad or the Indian Secret Service. You’re a detective, Owen, you believe in infiltration. So do they. Anyway, experience has shown by now that it’s easier to infiltrate a government than a company.’ Tu squeezed some lemon onto his schnitzel, though from the look on his face he seemed worried it might jump from the plate and run out of the door. ‘You said earlier that Orley Enterprises and the USA are the same thing in the end. They are. But only to the extent that Orley can set the conditions for American space flight. Of course, they don’t like that. They hate the idea, but the truth is that the USA is totally dependent on Orley. Their space programme and their whole energy plan is drip-fed from the world’s biggest tech company; it’s plugged in to Julian Orley’s money and his boffins’ know-how. To that extent, Orley might be the same thing as American space-flight, but Washington’s a long way from being the same as Orley. Even if you knew everything about what the American government was planning, you still wouldn’t have much idea about Orley Enterprises. That corporation’s a fortress. It’s a parallel universe. It’s a state in its own right. Extraterritorial.’

  ‘And Zheng?’

  ‘Well, that’s different. American presidents may have been in hock to the oil lobby, or the steel barons or the military-industrial complex, but they were never totally identical. Even if that’s just because the big corporations are by definition private in democratic countries. It’s different in China – historically, they’re rooted in the State, but they do what they like.’

  ‘Are you telling me that the Party has lost power to the corporations?’ Jericho asked. ‘I’d be surprised to hear that.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Yoyo shook her head. ‘Losing power implies that somebody has shoved you aside and now rules in your place. But you’re still there, for all that maybe you’re sitting in opposition. But nobody shoved anybody aside in China, it was more like a one-hundred-per-cent transformation, a metamorphosis. Every old communist who kicked the bucket made room for some bright young thing with a Party membership book in his pocket and a chair on the board of a profit-making company.’

  ‘It’s not much different in America.’

  ‘But it is. Washington has lost power to Orley Enterprises, and that probably makes the government stare out of the window cursing on rainy days, but at least there’s somebody to stare and curse. There are no State institutions left in China where that could happen. The whole shooting match might still call itself communism, but it’s really just a self-appointed government by corporate consortium.’

  ‘You can look at it the other
way round though,’ said Tu, as though the two of them were moderating a political talk-show. ‘China is governed by managers who have a second job in politics. The Western world still has a few heads of state who’ll say No when private enterprise is saying Yes. Maybe the great big No dwindles away to a hopeless little bleating No, but at least there’s still something or someone defending a position. In China you just have to imagine what No looks like when it’s made up of a whole load of Yeses. When Deng Xiaoping decided to allow some experiments in privatisation, lots of people wondered how much privatisation would be allowed in future. Well, the question’s obsolete by now, since in the end communism itself was privatised.’ He put down his knife and fork, picked the schnitzel up in his fingers and bit into it. ‘And that, Owen, is why it’s simpler to get information about a Chinese company from abroad than it is in China. If you want internal details about Zheng, all you have to do is tap into the flow of intelligence in all the nations spying on Beijing. And as it happens, I know some people in the intelligence services.’

  Jericho fell silent. He had no idea whom Tu knew, or when he had crossed paths with the Secret Services in his busy lifetime, but he knew that he had rarely been given such a clear picture of a world where either the governments had been taken over by the corporations, or the corporations had lifted themselves clear of all governmental control.

  Who was their enemy?

  Around ten o’clock he felt tired, drained, while Yoyo was suggesting that they check out the local night life and see what trouble they could get into. She was in frantic high spirits. Tu demanded a look at the Kurfürstendamm. Jericho logged into Diane and teased out a list of the hot clubs and karaoke bars. Then he said he’d go back to the hotel, using the excuse that he had to work, which even happened to be true. He had been neglecting some of his clients dreadfully these past two days.