The package has been damaged. It is no longer responding to commands and cannot reach deployment under its own power. This changes your mission. You will repair the package or bring the contents to operational destination yourself. If circumstances permit, you can bring forward insertion. Act swiftly!
Swiftly.
Hanna stared at the display. The implications were quite clear, as present as an unwelcome visitor. Swiftly meant now, or as soon as possible without arousing suspicion. It meant that he would have to leave and then return while everybody was asleep.
Back to Peary Base.
Table Talk
Since they had made love free-floating in orbit, Tim had spared Amber any further speculation about the state of Lynn’s mental health, and tried to convince himself that he was showing consideration for his wife, since she was so grimly determined to enjoy the trip; in fact it was because he was quite busy enough grappling with his own dilemmas. More and more he found himself enjoying a trip that he had resolved whole-heartedly to hate: the way the trip had been arranged, Julian’s arrogant and high-handed part in it. And the more he was having fun, the more he felt a creeping adolescent sense of betrayal. He was susceptible, he had been corrupted, and by a ticket! He tried to persuade himself that it was only the overwhelming experiences and impressions that somehow, against all expectation, made him like the old snake-charmer. Hadn’t he been dead set on hating Julian, the megalomaniac, who couldn’t see that he trampled other people underfoot on his march into the future? Who neglected his nearest and dearest, or put them on pedestals, who couldn’t understand that they needed a drop of normality in their lives?
It would have been so wonderfully simple just to hate him.
But the Julian he had got to know in the narrow confines of the spaceship unnerved him by not being ignorant and egomaniacal, or at least not enough to bear out Tim’s sweeping condemnation. Rather, he reminded Tim of his childhood, when he had admired Dad so much. Reminded him of Crystal, who right up to the very moment her sanity had finally crumbled away had insisted that she had never known a more loving man than his father, who had called him her sunbeam, bringing her happiness – all too quickly, before he was gone again. She had praised and admired him, and an hour before she died, he had taken to the skies in a sub-orbital craft of his own design, slipping away into the thermosphere even though he knew how critical her condition was. He had known it – and had forgotten just long enough to break a record, win a prize and earn his son’s everlasting enmity.
Lynn had forgiven Julian.
Tim had not.
Instead he had been hard at work demonising the man. And even now he couldn’t forgive Julian, even if, or perhaps even because, he could see the pillars that held up his hatred crumbling away. This hotel couldn’t have been built solely out of greed and a ruinous sense of self-aggrandisement. There must be more behind it, a dream too overpowering to be shared with only a few family members. Whether he wanted to or not, secretly he was beginning to understand the old guy, the fever in his blood that made him push back all boundaries, his nomadic nature that let him blaze trails where others saw only dead ends, his passionate attachment to progress, innovation, and he began to grow jealous of Julian’s great love, the world. And as this change of mind smouldered away below the surface of all he thought he had believed, he felt uncomfortably aware that perhaps he was overreacting where Lynn was concerned, perhaps – without ever intending to! – he was using her as an excuse to get at Julian, that in fact he cared less about her happiness than about Julian’s guilt. He flirted with the idea that perhaps she really did feel as fine as she was always claiming, and that he had no reason to feel ashamed of mellowing towards his dad. And suddenly, over dinner in Gaia’s nose, or rather where her nose would be if she had one, with the magnificent view of the canyon before his eyes, he wanted nothing more than just to be allowed to have fun, without the ghosts of his past sitting down at table with him, the ghosts that brought out the worst in him.
‘It looks like you’re enjoying that,’ Amber said appreciatively.
They were seated at a long table in Selene, with its black-blue-silver decor, eating red mullet with a saffron risotto. The fish tasted fresh-caught, as though it had just come from the sea.
‘Bred in salt water,’ Axel Kokoschka, the chef, informed them. ‘We’ve got great big underground tanks.’
‘Isn’t it rather complicated to re-create ocean conditions up here?’ asked Karla Kramp. ‘I mean, you don’t just tip salt into the water?’
Kokoschka considered the question. ‘Not just that, no.’
‘Salinity varies from one biotope to the next down on Earth, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it take a particular chemical composition to make an environment where animal life can thrive? Chloride, sulphate, sodium, traces of calcium, potassium, iodine, and so on.’
‘Fish has to feel at home, yes, that’s right.’
‘I just want to know what’s what. Don’t a great many fish need a permanent current, a steady oxygen supply, constant temperature, all of that?’
Kokoschka nodded thoughtfully, rubbed his bald head with a shy smile, scratched industriously at his three-day beard. He said, ‘Quite,’ and vanished. Karla watched him go, flummoxed.
‘Thanks for the explanation!’ she called after him.
‘Not exactly a great talker, is he?’ grinned Tim.
She speared a piece of mullet and made it vanish between her Modigliani lips.
‘If he can make a fish taste like this up here on the Moon, for all I care he can cut his own tongue out.’
Two restaurants and two bars took up four floors in Gaia’s head, their front walls all of glass. The panes curved right the way round to where the temples would be, so that there were wide-screen views all around. Selene and Chang’e, the two restaurants, were in the lower half, with the Luna Bar above them, and right up at the top the Mama Quilla Club for dancing under the stars. From there a glassed-in airlock led to the topmost point of the whole hotel, a viewing terrace which could only be entered in a spacesuit, offering a spectacular 360-degree view. Kokoschka’s shyness aside, he served the group of guests with exemplary attention, as did Ashwini Anand, Michio Funaki and Sophie Thiel. Lynn was praised from all sides for her hotel. She let her own food go cold as she cheerfully doled out information, answered questions at length, in high spirits and visibly flattered by the attention. For a while there was no other topic of conversation but this strange new world they now walked upon, Gaia, and the quality of the food.
Then the focus of talk shifted.
‘Chang’e,’ said Mukesh Nair thoughtfully over the main course, venison with truffles, served with wafer-thin slices of toast that gleamed as the foie gras melted on them. ‘Isn’t that a term from the Chinese space programme?’
‘Yes and no.’ Rogachev took a swig of the low-alcohol Château Palmer. ‘There were a few probes of that name; the Chinese sent them up to explore the Moon at the beginning of the century. But in fact it’s a mythological figure.’
‘Chang’e, the moon goddess.’ Lynn nodded.
‘Gaia seems to have a head full of myths then,’ smiled Nair. ‘Selene was the Greek moon goddess, wasn’t she? And Luna was the goddess in ancient Rome—’
‘Even I know that,’ said Miranda gleefully. ‘Luna, and then Sol the sun god, the jerk. Eternal gods, y’know, up, down, round and round, never stopping. One comes home and the other one leaves, like a married couple working different shifts.’
‘The sun and moon. Shift workers.’ Rogachev twitched his lips in a smile. ‘That makes sense.’
‘I am so interested in gods and astrology! The stars tell us our future, you know.’ She leaned forward, overshadowing the venison scraps on her plate with the great twin stars of her breasts, which she had poured into some shimmering scrap of almost nothing for the evening. ‘And do you know what? You want to hear something else?’ She stabbed the air with her fork. ‘Some of them, the ones that really had a clue what
was going on in ancient Rome, they called her Noctiluca, they lit up a temple all for her, at night on the Palatine, that’s one of the hills in the city. I’ve been there, y’know, Rome’s like full of hills, not a city up in the hills though, it’s a city on the hills, if you get me.’
‘You should tell us more about your travels,’ Nair said amiably. ‘What does Noctiluca mean?’
‘The one who lights up the night,’ Miranda said solemnly, and rewarded herself with an uncommonly large gulp of red wine.
‘And Mama Quilla?’
‘Somebody’s mom, I’d guess. Julian, what’s Mama Quilla?’
‘Well, we were rather running out of moon goddesses,’ said Julian with relish, ‘but then Lynn dug up a few more, Ningal, the wife of Sin, the Assyrian god of the moon; Annit, she was Babylonian; Kusra from Arabia, Isis from Egypt—’
‘But we liked Mama Quilla most of all,’ Lynn spoke across him. ‘Mother Moon, an Inca goddess. Even today the heirs of the Inca culture worship her as the protector of married women—’
‘Oh, really?’ Olympiada Rogacheva pricked up her ears. ‘I think the bar might turn out to be my favourite place.’
Rogachev didn’t bat an eye.
‘I find it surprising that you considered using the Chinese moon goddess,’ said Nair, picking up the thread again hastily before the embarrassment could spread.
‘Why not?’ asked Julian artlessly. ‘Are we prejudiced?’
‘Well, you are China’s greatest competitor!’
‘Not me, Mukesh. You mean the USA.’
‘Yes, of course. But nevertheless, sitting here at this table I see Americans, Canadians, English and Irish, Germans, Swiss, Russians and Indians, and until a while ago we had the pleasure of our French friends’ company. But I don’t see a single Chinese person.’
‘Don’t worry, they’re here,’ said Rogachev equably. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, they’re not a thousand kilometres from here, south-west, busy digging away at the regolith.’
‘But they’re not here.’
‘No Chinese investor has shown an interest in our project,’ said Julian. ‘They want their own elevator.’
‘Don’t we all?’ remarked Rogachev.
‘Yes, but as you have rightly pointed out, unlike Moscow, Beijing is already mining helium-3.’
‘Talking of the elevator.’ Ögi scooped up foie gras onto the dark-red meat. ‘Is it true that they’re just about to make the breakthrough?’
‘The Chinese?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘They make that announcement with admirable regularity.’ Julian smiled knowingly. ‘If it were actually the case, Zheng Pang-Wang would not take every opportunity he can find to drink tea with me.’
‘But’ – Mukesh Nair propped himself up on his elbows and massaged his imposingly fleshy nose – ‘isn’t it the case that your American friends would take lasting umbrage if you were to flirt with the Chinese, especially after the Moon crisis last year? I mean to say, are you perhaps not quite so free in your decisions as you would like to be?’
Julian pursed his lips. His face darkened, as always when he set out to explain the extent of his independence of all government power. Then he spread his arms in a fatalistic gesture.
‘Just look, what’s the reason you’re all here? Even though the nation-states all make a big noise about how effective their space programmes are, they would leap at the chance to get in line with the Americans if the offer were ever made. Or let’s say, they’d try to deal as equal partners, meaning that they would pump money into NASA’s budget and then they’d get to stake their claims. But the offer’s never made, and there’s a very good reason for that. There’s an alternative, though. You can support me, and this offer is exclusively reserved for private investors. I’m not selling know-how, but I’m inviting participation. Whoever joins in can earn a great deal of money but can’t give away any formulas or blueprints. That’s why my partners in Washington are prepared to put up with this little dinner party of ours. They know that none of your countries are going to be building a space elevator in the foreseeable future, let alone developing the infrastructure to extract helium-3. There’s no technological basis, there’s no budget, in short, there’s nothing at all. Evidently, people such as yourselves would only ever lose money by investing in your own national space programmes at home. Which is why Washington is ready to believe that we’re just talking about shares and investment here. It’s a different matter with China though. Beijing has built the infrastructure! They’re mining the helium-3! They’ve laid their groundwork, but they are working with old-fashioned technology, which limits them. That’s their dilemma. They’ve already come too far to hitch themselves to another partner, but they simply don’t have the blasted elevator! Believe me, under the circumstances there’s not one Chinese politician or investor who would put even a single yuan into my hands, unless of course—’
‘They could buy you,’ Evelyn Chambers cut in. She was following several conversations at once. ‘Which is why Zheng Pang-Wang drinks tea with you.’
‘If there were a Chinese dinner guest at the table tonight, he certainly wouldn’t be here intending to invest. Washington would conclude that I was taking offers for a transfer of know-how.’
‘Don’t they already think that, given that you meet with Zheng?’ asked Nair.
‘People meet all the time in this industry. At congresses, symposia. So what? Zheng’s an entertaining old rogue, I like him.’
‘But your friends are getting nervous anyway, aren’t they?’
‘They’re always nervous.’
‘They’re right to be. Anybody who gets up here will start digging.’ Ögi wiped his bristling moustache and threw the napkin down by his plate. ‘Why don’t you do it though, Julian?’
‘What? Switch sides?’
‘No, no. Nobody’s talking about switching sides. I mean, why don’t you just sell the space elevator technology to any country that wants to buy, and then you’d be rolling in gold? There’d be healthy competition up here on the Moon, and that would be a real boost to your reactor business. You could secure shares in the extraction side of things worldwide, you could negotiate exclusive contracts for the electricity supply, just as our absent friend Tautou controls fresh water. They sign him over whole aquifers in exchange for treatment plants and supply chain.’
‘Meaning that you would not switch from one dependent position to another,’ said Rogachev, taking up the idea, ‘but everybody would depend on you.’ He raised his glass to Julian, slightly mocking. ‘A true philanthropist.’
‘And how is that supposed to work?’ Rebecca Hsu broke in.
‘Why not?’ asked Ögi.
‘You want to let China, Japan, Russia, India, Germany, France and who knows else all have access to the elevator technology?’
‘Pay for access,’ Rogachev corrected her.
‘It’s a bad plan, Oleg. It wouldn’t take long for all of them to be knocking heads up here.’
‘It’s a big moon.’
‘No, it’s a small moon. So small that my neighbours in Red China and your American friend, Julian, have nothing better to do with their time than make for the same place to mine in, am I right? It only needed two nations,’ she said, holding up index finger and middle finger, ‘to start a squabble which is euphemistically described as the Moon crisis. The world was on the brink of armed superpower confrontation, and that wasn’t much fun.’
‘Why did the two of them go to the same place?’ Miranda asked ingenuously. ‘Accidentally?’
‘No.’ Julian shook his head. ‘Because measurements suggest that the border region between the Oceanus Procellarum and the Mare Imbrium has unusually high concentrations of helium-3, the type you’d usually find only on the dark side of the Moon. There’s a bay, the Sinus Iridum, next door and east of the Montes Jura, which seems to be similarly rich in deposits. So obviously everybody claims the right to mine there.’
Rebecca furrowed her bro
w. ‘And how’s that going to be any different with more nations?’
‘It should be. If we can divide the Moon up before the gold rush starts. But you’re right of course, Rebecca. You’re all right. I have to admit that I applaud the idea that space travel should be the concern of the whole human race.’
‘Perfectly understandable.’ Nair smiled. ‘You will only profit from the good cause.’
‘And us too, of course,’ Ögi said emphatically.
‘Yes, it’s a noble ideal.’ Rogachev put down his cutlery. ‘There’s only one problem, Julian.’
‘Which is?’
‘How to survive such a shift of opinion.’
Hanna
Small chocolate cakes, served lukewarm, released a gush of heavy, dark sauce when cut open, flooding out into the colourful fruit purees surrounding them. At about ten o’clock a leaden tiredness descended over the table. Julian announced that the next morning was free time, after which everybody could enjoy the hotel facilities to their heart’s content or take a look around the lunar surface nearby. There would be no longer excursions until the day after. Dana Lawrence enquired as to whether everything was to their satisfaction. They all had words of praise, Hanna included.
‘And I still don’t think that Cobain would mean anything to the kids today if we hadn’t made that film,’ O’Keefe insisted in the lift. ‘Just look where grunge has ended up. On the “lousy music” shelves. Nobody’s interested in guys like him any more. The kids prefer to listen to the artificial stuff, The Week That Was, Ipanema Party, Overload—’
‘You used to play grunge with your own band though,’ said Hanna.
‘Yes, and I gave up. My God, I think I was ten years old when Cobain died. I wonder what the hell he meant to me.’
‘Don’t give me that! You played the guy.’
‘I could play Napoleon as well, you know, doesn’t mean I’m going to try to rule all Europe. It’s always been like that, people think that whoever their heroes are at the time, they must be important. Important! There are always important albums in pop music, then twenty years later not a living soul has heard of them.’