‘The press release is out. So yes, it came up.’
‘And? How was it received?’
‘As an attempt to get ourselves back in action. At least most people are being kind about it.’
‘That’s great! As soon as I get back, let’s sign the contracts.’
‘Other people think it’s a smokescreen.’ Palstein hesitated. ‘Let’s not kid ourselves, Julian. It’s a great help to us that you’re getting us on board—’
‘It’s a help to us!’
‘But it’s not going to work any miracles. We’ve been concentrating on petrol for far too long. Well, the main thing for us is to avoid competition. I’d rather have a future as a middle-sized company than go bankrupt as a giant. The consequences would be terrible. There’s nothing you can do about your downward slide, but you may be able to prevent the crash. Or cushion it at least.’
‘If anyone can do it, you can. God, Gerald! It’s a real shame you can’t be with us.’
‘Next time. Who took my place, by the way?’
‘A Canadian investor called Carl Hanna. Heard of him?’
‘Hanna?’ Palstein frowned. ‘To be quite honest—’
‘Doesn’t matter. I didn’t know him either until a few months ago. One of those people who got rich on the quiet.’
‘Interested in space travel?’
‘That’s exactly what makes him so interesting! You don’t have to make the subject tempting for him. He wants to invest in space travel anyway. Unfortunately he spent his youth in New Delhi and feels obliged to sponsor India’s moon programme because of his old connection.’ Julian grinned. ‘So I’ll have to make a big effort to win the guy over.’
‘And the rest of the gang?’
‘I’m pretty sure that Locatelli will come up with an eight-figure sum. His megalomania alone dictates that he needs a monument in space, and our facilities are equipped with his systems. Involvement would be only logical. The Donoghues and Marc Edwards have promised me major sums on the quiet, the only issue is how many zeroes there are going to be at the end. There’s a really interesting Swiss guy, Walo Ögi. Lynn and I met his wife two years ago in Zermatt; she took some pictures of me. Then we have Eva Borelius on board, perhaps you know her, German stem-cell research—’
‘Am I right in thinking that you’ve simply copied out the Forbes List?’
‘It wasn’t exactly like that. Borelius Pharmaceuticals was recommended to me by our strategic management team, and so was Bernard Tautou, the water tsar from Suez. Another guy whose ego just needs massaging. Or there’s Mukesh Nair—’
‘Ah, Mr Tomato.’ Palstein raised his eyebrows appreciatively.
‘Yes, nice guy. But he has no stake in space travel. It doesn’t do us much good that he’s rich, so we’ve had to bring a few extra criteria into play. Wanting to give humanity a more viable future, for example. Even the anti-space-travel brigade stand shoulder to shoulder on that one: Nair with food, Tautou with water, Borelius with medicine, me with energy. That unites us, and it’s encouraging the others. And then there are privately wealthy individuals like Finn O’Keefe, Evelyn Chambers and Miranda Winter—’
‘Miranda Winter? My God!’
‘What, why not? She doesn’t know what to do with all her money, bless her, so I’m inviting her to find out. Believe me, the mixture is perfect. Guys like O’Keefe, Evelyn and Miranda really loosen the gang up, it makes it really sexy, and in the end I’ll have them all on my side! Rebecca Hsu, with all her luxury brands, isn’t that interested in energy, but she goes for space travel as if she’d come up with the idea all by herself. She’s completely fixated on the idea that Moët et Chandon will be drunk on the Moon in future. Did you ever look at her portfolio? Kenzo, Dior, Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal, Dolce & Gabbana, Lacroix, Hennessy, not to mention her own brands, Boom Bang and the other stuff. As far as she’s concerned we’re a unique and inimitable brand. I could fund half of the OSS Grand with the advertising contracts I’m signing with her alone.’
‘Didn’t you invite that Russian too? Rogachev?’
Julian grinned. ‘He’s my very personal little challenge. If I manage to get him to put his billions into my projects, I’ll do a cartwheel in zero gravity.’
‘Moscow are hardly going to let him go.’
‘Wrong! They’ll practically force him into it if they think they can do business with me.’
‘Which will only be the case if you build them a space elevator. Until that happens, they’ll look on Rogachev as if his money’s flowing into American space travel through your project.’
‘Nonsense. It’ll look as if it’s flowing into a lucrative business, and that’s exactly what it will be doing! I’m not America, Gerald!’
‘I know that. Rogachev, on the other hand—’
‘He knows it too. A guy like that isn’t stupid, after all! There isn’t a country in the world today that’s capable of paying for space travel with its own funds. Do you really think that cheerful community of states that worked so harmoniously to set up the ISS was stirred by a spirit of international fraternity? Bullshit! None of them had the money to do it alone. It was the only way to send anything up into space without E.T. laughing himself sick. To do that they had to pull strings and swap information, with the result that they ended up with squat! Funds were short for everything, all kinds of crap was budgeted for, just not space travel. It was private individuals who changed that, after Burt Rutan flew the first commercial sub-orbital flight on Space Ship One in 2004, and who financed that? The United States of America? NASA?’
‘I know,’ Palstein sighed. ‘It was Paul Allen.’
‘Exactly! Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. Entrepreneurs showed the politicians how to get things done more quickly and efficiently. Like you, when your sector still meant something. You made presidents and toppled governments. Now it’s people like me paying off that pile of bank-breakers, doomsayers and nationalists. We have more money, more know-how, better people, a more creative climate. Without Orley Enterprises there would be no space elevator, no Moon tourism, reactor research wouldn’t be where it is today, nothing would. Even though it’s not exactly coming down with money, NASA would still have to justify itself to some incompetent regulatory agency or other every time it broke wind. We’re not regulated at all, not by any government in the world. And why? Because we’re not obliged to any government. Believe me, even Rogachev gets that one.’
‘Even so, you shouldn’t just go handing him the OSS user’s handbook. He might get it into his head to copy it.’
Julian chuckled. Then he grew suddenly serious.
‘Any news about your assassination attempt?’
‘Not really.’ Palstein shook his head. ‘They’re pretty sure where the shot was fired from, but that doesn’t really help them much. It was just a public event. There were loads of people there.’
‘I still don’t quite understand who would want to kill you. Your sector’s running out of puff. No one’s going to change that by shooting oil managers.’
‘People don’t think rationally.’ Palstein smiled. ‘Otherwise they’d have shot you. You basically invented helium-3 transport. Your lift finished off my sector.’
‘You could shoot me a thousand times, the world would still switch to helium-3.’
‘Quite. Actions like that aren’t calculated, they’re the product of despair. Of blind hatred.’
‘Exactly. Hatred has never been used to make things better.’
‘But it’s created more victims than anything else.’
‘Hmm, yes.’ Julian fell silent and rubbed his chin. ‘I’m not a hater. Hatred is alien to me. I can lose my temper. I can wish someone in hell and send him there, but only if there’s a point to it. Hatred is completely pointless.’
‘So we’re not going to find the murderer by looking for a motive.’ Palstein straightened the sling that held his arm. ‘Anyway. I just phoned you to wish you a pleasant journey.’
‘Next time you’
ll be there too! Soon as you’re better.’
‘I’d love to see all that.’
‘You will see it!’ Julian grinned. ‘You’ll go walking on the Moon.’
‘Good luck, then. Squeeze that cash out of them.’
‘Take care, Gerald. I’ll call you. From up at the top.’
Palstein smiled. ‘You are up at the top.’
Julian thoughtfully studied the empty screen. More than a decade ago, while the oil sector had still kept the Monopolies and Mergers Commission busy with their yields and price rises, Palstein had turned up in his London office one day, curious to see what sort of work went on there. The realisation of the lift had just suffered a sharp setback, because the optimistic new material from which the cable was to be made had apparently irreparable crystal structure flaws. The world already knew that moon dust contained huge quantities of an element that could solve all the world’s energy problems. But without a plan for mining the stuff and getting it to Earth, along with the lack of appropriate reactors, helium-3 seemed like an irrelevance. Even so, Julian had gone on researching on all fronts, ignored by the oil sector, which had its hands full fighting for alternative trends like wind power and photovoltaics. Hardly anyone really took Julian’s efforts seriously. It simply seemed too unlikely that he would be successful.
Palstein, on the other hand, had listened carefully to everything, and recommended to the board of his company – which had just changed its name to EMCO after its marriage to ExxonMobil – that they buy shares in Orley Energy and Orley Space. Notoriously, the company’s directors hadn’t got on board, but Palstein stayed in contact with Orley Enterprises, and Julian came to like and esteem this melancholy character, who was always gazing into the future. Even though they had barely spent three whole weeks together, usually at spontaneous lunches, now and again at events, rarely in a private context, they were bound together by something like friendship, even though the stubbornness of the one had finally consigned the other to oblivion. Lately Palstein had been forced with increasing frequency to announce the abandonment or limitation of mining projects, as he was doing currently in Alaska and as he had done three weeks previously in Alberta, where he had had to face hundreds of furious people and had promptly been shot.
Julian knew that the manager would prove to be right. A partnership with Orley Enterprises wouldn’t save EMCO, but it might be useful to Gerald Palstein. He stood up, left the room behind the bar and returned to his guests.
‘—so back here for dinner in three-quarters of an hour,’ Lynn was saying. ‘You can stay and enjoy the drinks and the view, or freshen up and change. You could even do some work, if that’s your drug, conditions here are ideal for that too.’
‘And for that you should thank my fantastic daughter,’ said Julian, putting his arm around her shoulder. ‘She’s stunning. She did all this. She’s the greatest as far as I’m concerned.’ Lynn lowered her head with a smile.
‘No false modesty,’ Julian whispered to her. ‘I’m very proud of you. You can do anything. You’re perfect.’
* * *
A little later Tim was walking along the corridor on the fourth floor. Everything was antiseptically clean. On the way he met two security men and a cleaning robot insistently searching for the nonexistent leftovers of a world only partially inhabited. There was something profoundly disheartening about the way the machine, buzzing busily, pursued the purpose of its existence. A Sisyphus that had rolled the stone up the mountain and now had nothing left to do.
He stopped in front of her room and rang the bell. A camera transmitted his picture inside, then Lynn’s voice said:
‘Tim! Come in.’
The door slid open. He entered the suite and saw Lynn, wearing an attractive evening dress, standing at the panoramic window with her back to him. Her hair was loose, and fell in soft waves to her shoulders. When she smiled at him over her shoulder, her pale blue eyes gleamed like aquamarines. With sudden brio she swung round and displayed her cleavage. Tim ignored it, while his sister stared so closely past him that her smile bordered on the idiotic. He walked to a spherical chair, bent down and gave the woman who was lolling in it – scantily clothed in a silk kimono, legs bent and head thrown back – a kiss on the cheek.
‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Really.’
‘Thanks.’ The thing in the evening dress went on strutting around, twisted and turned, wallowed in its transfigured ego, while the real Lynn’s smile started sagging at the corners.
Tim sat down on a stool and pointed at her holographic alter ego.
‘Are you planning to wear that tonight?’
‘I don’t know yet.’ Lynn frowned. ‘It’s a bit too formal, don’t you think? I mean, for a Pacific island.’
‘Odd idea. You’ve already thrown the rules of South Sea romanticism to the four winds. It looks great, put it on. Or are there alternatives?’
Lynn’s thumbs slid over the remote control. Her avatar’s appearance changed without transition. Hologram-Lynn was now wearing an apricot-coloured catsuit, bare at the arms and shoulders, which she presented with the same empty grace as she had the evening dress. Her gaze was directed at imaginary admirers.
‘Can you program her to look at you?’
‘Absolutely not! Do you think I want to stare at myself the whole time?’
Tim laughed. His own avatar was a character from the days of two-dimensional animations, WALL-E, a battered-looking robot whose winning qualities bore no relation to his external appearance. Tim had seen the film as a child and immediately fallen in love with the character. Perhaps because he himself felt battered in Julian’s world of shifting mountains and fetching stars down from the sky.
The avatar’s magnificent flowing locks were replaced by a chignon.
‘Better,’ said Tim.
‘Really?’ Lynn let her shoulders droop. ‘Damn, I’ve already had it up all day. But you’re right. Unless—’
The avatar presented a tight, turquoise blouse with champagne-coloured trousers.
‘And this?’
‘What on earth kind of clothes are those?’ Tim asked.
‘Mimi Kri. Mimi Parker’s new collection. She brought her entire range with her after I had to promise to wear some of it. Her catalogue is compatible with most of the avatar programs.’
‘So mine could wear them too?’
‘If they could be restitched to fit caterpillar tracks and bulldozer hands, then sure. Afraid not, Tim, it only works with human avatars. And by the way, the program is ruthless. If you’re too fat or too small for Mimi’s creation, it won’t recalculate. The problem is that most people improve their images so much for the avatar that everything fits the calculator and they look like shit afterwards anyway.’
‘Then it’s their own fault.’ Tim narrowed his eyes. ‘Hey, your avatar’s bum’s far too small! Half the size of your real one. No, a third. And where’s your paunch? And your cellulite?’
‘Idiot,’ Lynn laughed. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Nothing? Good reason to visit me.’
‘Well, yeah.’ He hesitated. ‘Amber says I’m worrying about you too much.’
‘No, it’s fine.’
‘I didn’t want to get on your nerves back there.’
‘It’s sweet of you to care. Really.’
‘Still, perhaps—’ He wrung his hands. ‘You know, it’s just that I suspect Julian of being completely blind to his surroundings. He may be able to locate individual atoms in the space–time continuum, but if you’re lying dead in your grave right in front of him, he’ll complain that you aren’t listening to him properly.’
‘You exaggerate.’
‘But he completely failed to acknowledge your breakdown. Remember?’
‘But that’s more than five years ago,’ Lynn said softly. ‘And he had no experience of anything like that.’
‘Nonsense, he denied it! What special experience do you need to recognise a burn
-out, complete with anxiety and depression, for what it is? In Julian’s world you don’t break down, that’s the point. He only knows superheroes.’
‘Perhaps he lacks the counterbalance. After mother died—’
‘Mother died ten years ago, Lynn. Ten years! Since he noticed that at some point she’d given up breathing, talking, eating and thinking, he’s been screwing everything that moves and—’
‘That’s his business. Really, Tim.’
‘I’ll shut up.’ He looked at the ceiling as if searching for clues to the real reason for his visit. ‘In fact I only came here to tell you your hotel is fantastic. And that I’m looking forward to the trip.’
‘That’s sweet.’
‘Seriously! You’ve got everything under control. Everything’s brilliantly organised!’ He grinned. ‘Even the guests are more or less bearable.’
‘If one of them doesn’t suit you we’ll dispose of him in the vacuum.’ She rolled her eyes and said in a hollow, sinister voice: ‘In space no one can hear you scream!’
‘Ha!’ Tim laughed.
‘I’m glad you’re coming,’ she added quietly.
‘Lynn, I promised to look after you, and that’s what I’m doing.’ He got to his feet, bent down to her and kissed her again. ‘So, see you later. Oh, and wear the trousers and the blouse. And your hair looks great down.’
‘That’s exactly what I wanted to hear, little brother.’
Tim left. Lynn let her avatar go on modelling and trying on jewellery. Traditionally, avatars were virtual assistants, programs made form, who helped organise the networked human being’s daily life and created the illusion of a partner, a butler or a playmate. They controlled data, remembered appointments, acquired information, navigated the web and made suggestions that matched their user’s personality profile. There were no restrictions on their design, which also included virtually cloning yourself, whether out of pure self-infatuation or simply to spare yourself a trip to the shops. Five minutes later Lynn called Mimi Parker. The avatar shrank and froze, while the Californian appeared on the holoscreen, dripping wet and with a towel around her hips.