Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Hmph! You despise Oleg?’

  ‘We despise each other.’

  Winter considered those words. She tried out, one at a time, a collection of suitable-seeming facial expressions: amazement, reflection, sympathy, puzzlement; she studied the outward appearance of the Russian woman as if seeing her for the very first time. Olympiada’s evening wear, a catsuit, one of Mimi Parker’s, that changed colour according to the wearer’s state of mind, hung on her as if it had been thrown over the back of a chair, eyeliner and jewellery competed to remove the traces of years of neglect and marital suffering. She could have looked so much better. A bit of botox in her cheeks and forehead, hyaluron to smooth the wrinkles around her mouth, a little implant here and there to firm up her confidence and her connective tissues. At that moment she decided to have the implants in her own bottom changed as soon as they got back. There was something wrong with them, if you sat on them for too long.

  ‘Why don’t you just leave him?’ she asked.

  ‘Why doesn’t a doormat leave the front door that it lies outside?’ Olympiada mused.

  Oh, God almighty! Winter was puzzled. Of course she found herself irresistible in all her firm glory, but did you really have to look like a gym-ripped Valkyrie to be spared the sorts of thoughts that Olympiada wallowed in?

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I think you’re making a mistake. A big fat error of reasoning.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. You think you’re shabby because you think no one wants you, so you allow yourself to be shabbily treated, just to be treated at all.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘But the truth is that no one wants you because you feel shabby. You understand? The other way round. Casuality, causality or whatever it’s called, that thing with cause and effect, I’m not that educated, but I know that’s how it works. You think other people think you’re crap, so you feel crap and look crap, and in the end what everyone sees is crap, so it comes full circle. Am I making myself understood? A kind of inner – prejudgement. Because in fact you’re your own biggest, erm … enemy. And because at some level you enjoy it. You want to suffer.’

  Wow, that sounded awesome! As if she’d been to college.

  ‘You think?’ Olympiada asked, and looked at Winter from the gloomy November puddles that were her eyes.

  ‘Of course!’ She liked this, it was getting really psychological. She ought to do this kind of thing more often. ‘And you know why you want to suffer? Because you’re looking for confirmation! Because you think you’re, as we’ve seen, you think you’re—’ Vocabulary, Miranda, vocabulary! Not just crap, what’s another word? ‘Shit. You think you’re shit, nothing else, but being shit is still better than being nothing at all, and if someone else thinks you’re shit too, you understand, then that’s a crystal-clear confirmation of what you think.’

  ‘Heavens above.’

  ‘Misery is reliable, believe me.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No, it is, feeling shit gives you something to depend on. What do people say when they go to church? God, I am sinful, worthless, I’ve done terrible things, even before I was born, I’m a miserable piece of filth, forgive me, and if you can’t that’s okay too, you’re right, I’m just an ant, an original ant—’

  ‘Original ant?’

  ‘Yes, original something or other!’ She gesticulated wildly, as if intoxicated. ‘There’s something like that in Christian stuff, where you’re the lowest of the low from the get-go. That’s exactly how you feel. You think suffering is home. Wrong. Suffering is shit.’

  ‘You never suffer?’

  ‘Of course I do, like a dog! You know that. I was an alcoholic, I was described as the worst actress ever, I was in jail, up before the court. Wow!’ She laughed, in love with the disaster of her own biography. ‘That was out of order.’

  ‘But why does none of that matter to you?’

  ‘It does, it does! Bad luck really matters to me.’

  ‘But you don’t think that from the outset you’re, erm—’

  ‘No.’ Winter shook her head. ‘Just briefly, when I was drinking. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what I was talking about here. But not fundamentally.’

  Olympiada smiled for the first time that evening, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure that her face was made for it.

  ‘Will you tell me a secret, Miranda?’

  ‘Anything, darling.’

  ‘How do you become like you?’

  ‘No idea.’ Winter reflected, thought seriously about the question. ‘I think you need a certain lack of … imagination.’

  ‘Lack of imagination?’

  ‘Yes.’ She laughed a whinnying laugh. ‘Just imagine, I have no imagination. Not a scrap. I can’t see myself the way others do. I mean, I can see that they think I’m cool, that they undress me with their eyes, fine. But otherwise I see myself only through my own eyes, and if I don’t like something I change it. I just can’t imagine how other people want me to be, so I don’t try to be that way.’ She paused and indicated to Funaki that her glass was empty. ‘And now you stop seeing yourself through Oleg’s eyes, okay? You’re nice, really nice! Oh, my God, you’re a member of the Russian – what is it again?’

  ‘Parliament.’

  ‘And rich and everything! And where your appearance is concerned, okay, fine, I’ll be honest with you, but give me four weeks and I’ll make a femme fatale out of you! You don’t need any of that, Olympiada. You certainly don’t need to miss Oleg.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You know what?’ She gripped Olympiada’s upper arm and lowered her voice. ‘Now I’ll tell you a real secret: men only make women feel they’re shit because they feel shit themselves. You get it? They try to break our confidence, they try to steal it from us because they have none themselves. Don’t do that! Don’t let them do that to you! You have to fly your own flag, honey. You’re not what he wants you to be.’ Complicated sentence structure, but it worked. She was getting better and better.

  ‘He might never come back,’ Olympiada murmured, apparently spotting a path opening up into sunnier climes.

  ‘Exactly. Fuck him.’

  Olympiada sighed. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Michio, my darling,’ Winter crowed, and waved her empty glass. ‘One of these for my friend!’

  * * *

  Sophie Thiel was stumbling around in betrayal and deception when Tim came into the control centre. A dozen windows on the big multimedia wall reanimated the past.

  ‘Totally fake,’ said Sophie listlessly.

  He watched people crossing the lobby, entering the control centre, going about their work, leaving it. Then the rooms lay there again, gloomy and desperate, lit only by the harsh reflection of the sunlight on the edge of the gorge and the controls of the tireless machinery that kept the hotel alive. Sophie pointed to one of the shots. The camera angle was arranged in such a way that you could make out the far side of the Vallis Alpina, with mountains and monorail through the panoramic window.

  ‘The control centre, deserted. That night when Hanna went out on the Lunar Express.’

  Tim narrowed his eyes and leaned forward.

  ‘Don’t try just yet, you won’t get to see him. Your sister would say it’s because no one went anywhere. In fact, someone’s hoodwinking us with the oldest trick in the book. You see that thing blinking on the right-hand edge of the video wall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At almost exactly the same time something lights up down here, and there, a bit further on, an indicator light comes on. You see? Trivial things that no one would normally notice, but I’ve taken the trouble to look for matches. Take a look at the timecode.’

  05.53, Tim read.

  ‘You’ll find exactly the same sequence at ten past five.’

  ‘Coincidence?’

  ‘Not if close analysis reveals a tiny jump in the shadow on the Moon’s surface. The sequence was copied and added to hide an event that lasted jus
t two minutes.’

  ‘The arrival of the Lunar Express,’ whispered Tim.

  ‘Yes, and that’s exactly how it goes on. Hanna in the corridor, edited out, just like your father said. The control centre, apparently empty. But there was someone there. Someone who sat here and changed these videos; he’s just cut himself out. Perfectly done, the whole thing. The lobby, a different perspective that would show you Mr X coming into the control centre, but also faked, unfortunately.’

  ‘Someone must have spent an endless amount of time over it,’ Tim said, amazed.

  ‘No, it’s pretty fast if you know what needs to be done.’

  ‘Astounding!’

  ‘Frustrating above all, because it doesn’t get us anywhere. Now we know that it was done. But not who did it.’

  Tim pursed his lips. Suddenly he had an idea.

  ‘Sophie, if we can trace back when the work on the videos was done – if we could take a look at the records – I mean, can you manipulate the records as well?’

  She frowned. ‘Only if you take a lot of trouble.’

  ‘But it could be done?’

  ‘Basically it couldn’t. The intervention would be recorded as well. Hmm. I see.’

  ‘If we knew the exact times of the interventions, we could match them with the presence and absence of the guests and the staff. Who was where at the time in question? Who saw who? Our mystery person can’t possibly have changed all the data in the hotel system in the time available to him. So as soon as we see the records—’

  ‘We’ll have him.’ Sophie nodded. ‘But to do that we’d need an authorisation program.’

  ‘I’ve got one.’

  ‘What?’ She looked at him in surprise. ‘An authorisation program for this system?’

  ‘No, a common or garden little mole that I downloaded from the net last winter to look at a colleague’s data. With his permission,’ he added quickly. ‘His system did a screen shot every sixty seconds, and I had to get at those shots, but I didn’t have authorisation. So I resorted to the knowledge of some of my students. One of them recommended Gravedigger, an, erm, a not entirely legal reconstruction program, but one that’s quite easy to get hold of and compatible with almost every system. I kept it. It’s on my computer, and my computer—’

  ‘—is here in Gaia.’

  ‘Bingo.’ Tim grinned. ‘In my room.’

  Sophie smiled broadly. ‘Right, Mr Orley, so if you don’t mind—’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  It was only when he was on the way to the suite that it occurred to him that there might be another reason why Sophie found nothing but manipulated videos:

  She herself had recut the material.

  * * *

  Mukesh Nair pulled himself snorting out of the crater pool. A little further off Sushma was towelling herself dry, in conversation with Eva Borelius and Karla Kramp, while Heidrun Ögi and Finn O’Keefe played childish competitions, to see who could stay underwater longest. The Earth shone in through the panoramic window, like a reliable old friend. Nair picked a towel off the pile and rubbed the water out of his hair.

  ‘Do you feel like this?’ he said. ‘When I see our home, it’s curious: it looks entirely unimpressed.’

  ‘Unimpressed by what?’ asked Karla, and disappeared into her dressing gown.

  ‘By us.’ Mukesh Nair lowered the towel and looked up to the sky. ‘By the consequences of our actions. It’s got hotter everywhere. Previously inhabited areas are underwater, others are turning into deserts. Whole tribes of people are on the move, hungry, thirsty, unemployed, homeless, we’re seeing the biggest migrations in centuries, but there’s no sign of it at all. Not from this distance.’

  ‘Looking at the old lady from this distance, you wouldn’t know if we were bombing each other flat,’ said Karla. ‘Means nothing.’

  Nair shook his head, fascinated.

  ‘The deserts must have got bigger, don’t you think? Whole coastlines have changed. But if you’re far enough away – it doesn’t change her beauty in the slightest.’

  ‘If you’re far enough away,’ Sushma smiled, ‘even I’m beautiful.’

  ‘Oh, Sushma!’ Her husband tilted his head and laughed, showing perfectly restored teeth. ‘You will always be the most beautiful woman in the world to me, near or far. You’re my most beautiful vegetable of all!’

  ‘There’s a compliment,’ said Heidrun to Finn, water in one ear, Nair’s flattering baritone in the other. ‘Why do I never get to hear things like that?’

  ‘Because I’m not Walo.’

  ‘Lousy explanation.’

  ‘Comparing people to foodstuffs is his department.’

  ‘Is it just me, or have you stopped making much of an effort lately?’

  ‘Vegetables don’t spring to mind when I look at you. Asparagus, perhaps.’

  ‘Finn, I really have to say, that’s going to get you nowhere.’ She hurried to the edge of the pool, straightened and sent a great spray of water in Nair’s direction. ‘Hey! What are you talking about?’

  ‘The beauty of the Earth,’ smiled Sushma Nair. ‘And a bit about the beauty of women.’

  ‘Same thing,’ said Heidrun. ‘The Earth is female.’

  Eva tied the belt of her kimono. ‘You see beauty out there?’

  ‘Of course.’ Nair nodded enthusiastically. ‘Beauty and simplicity.’

  ‘Shall I tell you what I see?’ Eva Borelius said after thinking for a moment. ‘A misunderstanding.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Complete disproportion. The Earth out there has nothing to do with our familiar perception of it.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Heidrun. ‘For example, Switzerland normally seems the size of Africa to a Swiss person. On the other hand, in the emotional reality of a Swiss person, Africa shrinks to a hot, damp island full of poor people, mosquitoes, snakes and diseases.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about.’ Eva nodded. ‘I see a beautiful planet, but not one that we share. A world which, in terms of what some have and others don’t, should look completely different.’

  ‘Bravo.’ Finn O’Keefe bobbed over and applauded.

  ‘Enough, Finn,’ hissed Heidrun. ‘Do you even know what we’re talking about?’

  ‘Of course,’ he yawned. ‘About how Eva Borelius had to fly to the Moon to discover the bleedin’ obvious.’

  ‘No.’ Eva laughed drily and started picking up her swimming things. ‘I’ve always known what the planet looks like, Finn, but it’s still different seeing it like this. It reminds me who we’re actually researching for.’

  ‘You’re researching for the guy who’s paying you. Have you only just realised?’

  ‘That free research is going down the toilet? No.’

  ‘Not that you personally have any reason to complain,’ Karla joined in maliciously.

  ‘Hey, hang on.’ Eva, caught in a pincer movement, raised her eyebrows. ‘Am I complaining?’

  Karla looked innocently back. ‘I just wanted to say.’

  ‘Of course, stem cell research brings in money, so she gets some too. It cost a lot of money to take the isolation and investigation of adult cells and develop it into the production of artificial tissue. Now we’ve decoded the protein blueprints of our body cells, we work successfully with molecular prosthetics, we have replacements for destroyed nerves and burnt skin, we can produce new cardiac muscle cells, we can cure cancer, because not even the wealthiest people in the world are spared heart attacks, cancer and burn injuries.’ She paused. ‘But they are spared malaria. And cholera. Those are diseases for poor people. If we were to apportion budgets purely on the quantitative occurrence of such diseases, the greatest amount of research money would flow to the Third World. Instead, the majority of all malaria patents, even the most promising, are put on ice, because you can’t earn any money with them.’

  Nair went on looking at the far-away Earth, still smiling, but more thoughtfully.

  ‘I come from an unimaginably
big country,’ he said. ‘And at the same time from a graspable cosmos. I’ve never had the impression that there’s just one world, not least because we see it from all perspectives at the same time. No one sees it as a whole, no one sees the whole truth. But if we see the world as a multiplicity of small, interlocking worlds, each determined by its own rules, you can try to improve some of them. And that helps you to understand the whole. If my job had been to improve the world, I would definitely have failed.’

  ‘So what have you improved?’ asked Karla.

  ‘A few of those little worlds.’ He beamed at them. ‘At least I hope so.’

  ‘You’ve carpeted India with air-conditioned shopping centres, connected whole villages to the internet, provided God knows how many thousands of Indian farmers with a basic living. But haven’t you also opened the door to multinational companies, by offering them the chance to get involved?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And haven’t some of them gratefully taken up your model, rented Indian land and replaced the farmers with machines and cheap labourers?’

  Nair’s smile froze on his face. ‘Any idea can be corrupted.’

  ‘I’d just like to understand.’

  ‘Certainly, such things happen. We can’t allow that.’

  ‘Look, I don’t entirely agree with your romanticisation of inequality. Small, autonomous worlds. You do a lot of good things, Mukesh, but you’re globalisation personified. Which I think is fine, as long as the tiny little worlds aren’t swallowed up by the big companies—’

  ‘Shouldn’t we be getting back to our rooms?’ said Eva.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Karla shrugged. ‘Let’s go. Typical of you, always going on about how annoyed you are, and then getting all ashamed when I mention some concrete examples.’

  ‘Where have the others got to, by the way?’ Sushma shook her head uneasily. ‘They should have been back ages ago.’

  ‘When we came down here they were still on their way.’

  ‘And they still are, by the look of it,’ said Nair. Then he rested a friendly hand on Karla’s shoulder. ‘And you’re completely right, Karla. We should talk about this kind of thing more often. And not spare each other’s feelings.’