‘Great music stays alive.’
‘Bullshit. Who knows Prince these days? Who knows Axl Rose? Keith Richards, the only thing we know about him is that he was a mediocre guitar player for a beer-hall band whose songs all sounded the same. Believe you me, the gods of pop are overrated. All stars are overrated. No two ways. We don’t go down in history, we just go down to the grave. Unless of course you commit suicide or get shot.’
‘And why does everyone these days draw on the works of the seventies and eighties? If what you say is true, then—’
‘Okay, it just happens to be in fashion.’
‘Has been for a while.’
‘And what does that prove? In ten years’ time there’ll be another nine days’ wonder. Nucleosis, for instance, that kind of thing keeps coming around again, two women and a computer, and the computer composes about half their stuff.’
‘There’s always been computers.’
‘Not always as the composer though. I’m telling you, day after tomorrow, all the stars will be machines.’
‘Codswallop. They used to say that twenty-five years ago. What came back? Singer-songwriting. Handmade music will never die.’
‘Could be. Could be we’re just too old. Good night.’
‘G’night, Finn.’
Hanna crossed the bridge to his suite and went in. He’d dutifully followed all the conversations as the evening went on, without getting caught up in knotty discussions. For a while he’d tried to share Eva Borelius’ passion for horses, and then had steered her towards music, only to find himself bogged down in German Romanticism, about which he knew less than nothing. O’Keefe saved him with a few remarks about the comatose condition of Britpop at the end of the Nineties, about Mando-prog and psychobilly, just the thing to talk about when your thoughts were elsewhere, and Hanna’s thoughts really were. Everyone would go off to sleep soon, that much was clear. Back on board the spaceship they had been warned that there’d be a price to pay for the days in zero gravity, the exertions of landing, their bodies adjusting and the flood of new experiences. The bedroom was clad with a mooncrete slab at bed height, so that in an hour at latest, nobody would be looking outside at all, and the staff lived below ground anyway.
Time to wait.
He lay down on the comically thin mattress that was nevertheless enough to support him comfortably here, weighing only sixteen kilos as he did; he put his hands behind his head and shut his eyes for a moment. If he stayed lying here, he’d fall asleep, besides which he still had plenty to do before he set out. Whistling gently, he went back into the living room and stroked his guitar-case. He strummed a brief flamenco, then turned his instrument over on his knees, felt around the edges, pressed here and there, removed the clasp where the strap clipped on and lifted up the whole back.
There was a thin sheet of material fixed to it, exactly the shape of the guitar body, covered with a tracery of fine lines. Orley’s security team hadn’t examined his luggage, as they would have done with regular tourists, but had just asked a few polite questions. Nobody had even dreamed of doubting that his guitar was just a guitar. Julian’s guests were above all suspicion, but nevertheless the organisation had not wanted to take any risks; however, an X-ray would merely have revealed that the instrument had a thicker back than usual. Only an expert would have recognised even this, and certainly wouldn’t have known that it was because it was made of two boards lying on top of one another, and that the inner board was made of a special and extremely resistant material.
With both thumbs, he began to press pieces from the sheet. They popped out with a gentle click and fell to the floor, where they lay scattered like the parts of some kind of intelligence test. Next he took the neck of the guitar off the main body and slid out a pipe, forty centimetres long, and snapped this into two equal parts. Several narrower sections of pipe fell out and rolled over the carpet. Hanna swept them together into a heap, opened his suitcase and emptied the contents of his washbag in front of him. He put the shower gel, the shampoo and the kneadable earplugs all within reach, pulled the top off one of his two tubes of moisturiser, squeezed a clear stream of what was inside onto one of the components and then pressed another against it. Straight away the moisturising cream and the plastic panel pieces reacted chemically with one another. Hanna knew that at this stage he couldn’t afford the slightest mistake, that there was no way of adjusting what he built. He worked with clarity and concentration, without haste, then unscrewed one of the golf balls, took out tiny electronic components, assembled more parts and slotted them into place. In a few minutes he was holding something flat in his hands, a device with a pipe sticking out from the front like the muzzle of a pistol, which indeed it was. It looked curiously archaic. It had a grip, but instead of a trigger, there was simply a switch. Hanna took the remaining pieces and built an identical device, examined both weapons minutely and then went on to the next stage of his work.
Here he took apart various bits of kit from his washbag and then put them back together in a different order until he had made twenty projectiles, each with chambers that had to be filled separately. Working with the utmost care, he put tiny quantities of the shower gel into the left chambers, and shampoo into the right, and then sealed the capsules. He took the short shells from the neck of the guitar and put into each one a piece of earplug and a small gelatine capsule from a pack of indigestion tablets. Last of all, he put a payload into the tip of each shell, loading five into the handle of the first weapon he had built and then five into the second. Then he put the base of the guitar back onto the body, fastening the neck in place with an expert twist. He collected the last scraps left over from the plastic sheet and shoved them under everything else in his suitcase. He packed the tubes and bottles back into the washbag and then paused as he picked up the aftershave.
Ah yes.
He looked at the bottle thoughtfully. Then he lifted the cap, held it up in front of his throat and pressed the nozzle briefly, firmly.
The aftershave was aftershave.
* * *
Nobody crossed his path as he left the suite.
He was wearing spacesuit, harness and survival pack, his helmet clamped under his arm. One of the loaded guns was nestled against his thigh, hidden in a pocket of the same material as the spacesuit so that nobody would notice it. He was also carrying five loose rounds of ammunition. Granted, he hardly expected to need to use the pistol tonight. If everything went as planned, he would never be forced to use it at all, but experience had taught him that errors could creep into the tidiest plan with the persistence of cockroaches. Some time or other the gun could turn out to be very useful indeed. From now on, it would be with him at all times.
With nobody around, Gaia’s vast body breathed the atmosphere of a monument that had outlived its builders. Far below lay the deserted lobby. He waited for the doors of E2 to slide apart, entered the cabin and pressed 01. The lift zoomed down to the underground level. He got out in the basement and followed the signs to the wide corridor they had come along just a few hours before, empty here as well, bathed in cold white light and filled with a monotonous hum. Hanna stepped onto one of the conveyor bands. It started up, passing the airlocks that led up to the lunar surface, then the vast hallway that led to the garage – as the hotel’s underground landing field was called – then a branch corridor to a narrow tunnel, two kilometres long, leading dead straight to the small helium-3 reactor that supplied Gaia’s energy during the lunar night. At the end of the corridor he stepped off the conveyor and looked through a window into the station hall. The Lunar Express was sitting on its tracks, linked to the corridor via gangways. He went inside the train and walked down between the empty seats to the driver’s chair. The on-board computer was activated, the display all lit up. Hanna entered a code and waited for authorisation. Then he turned round, took a seat in the first row and stretched out his legs.
He would have been able to do none of this if he had been just a regular guest. But Ebola ha
d got everything ready for him. Ebola made sure that there was nothing Carl Hanna couldn’t do here on the Moon, no locked doors, no access forbidden.
Slowly, the Lunar Express drew out.
* * *
In his forty-four years of life so far Hanna had grown well used to keeping things clear-cut. In India he had taken part in a whole series of covert operations that would hardly have marked him as a friend of the country if he had been exposed. At the same time he had a circle of local friends and lived with Indian women. He worked against his hosts’ interests, undermining the federal democracy’s economic and military autonomy, but unlike many of his colleagues he didn’t spend his time in cheap bars, seedy joints or expensive clubs that held an alcohol licence. He didn’t tip toddy or whisky down his gullet or make racist remarks about the locals when he thought nobody was listening; instead he took care to integrate himself, he rented a neat little flat in the heart of New Delhi and developed a passion for curries and the spice market. He wasn’t by nature a man who made friends quickly, but over the years the country’s culture and people grew on him, and for a while he even flirted with the idea of settling down on the banks of the Yamuna. His job required a talent to deceive and a steady stream of lies, but if he wasn’t actually at work, he tried to live an absolutely normal life out there, following the country’s motto Satyameva Jayate, truth alone shall prevail. He felt no contradiction in such a Janus-faced existence, rather it helped him, Hanna the citizen, break all connections with Hanna the consummate liar, so that they never got in one another’s way.
And now too he was enjoying the ride even with the task ahead of him; he enjoyed the unending vistas of the Mare Imbrium, the play of shadows over Plato, the rugged threat of the polar mountains drawing closer, the train’s rapid climb. Once more the darkness of the crater’s shadow engulfed him as the train raced along the chasm between Peary and Hermite, towards the American moon base, at 700 kilometres an hour.
Then, without warning, it slowed.
And stopped.
The Lunar Express clung to a lonely mountainside amidst the no man’s land of the polar craters, less than fifty kilometres from the base. Hanna stood up and went to the middle of the train, where lockers lined the aisle. He rolled up the door of one of these and glanced briefly at the box of kit stored behind it, then studied the assembly plan on the back wall. He heaved down an oval platform with folding telescopic legs and eight little spherical tanks. It had short arms with nozzles that could turn in all directions, and two loaded battery packs. A thick column rising from the platform ended in a crossbar with hand-grips, between which a display gleamed. It was simplicity itself to assemble the thing: after all the grasshopper had been designed for emergencies, when the tour guide might be incapacitated and the guests had to cope for themselves. When it was fully built it stood on coiled legs and had enough room for two astronauts, the one in front steering. Hanna walked it over to the airlock, went back to the locker, took out a toolbox and a device with a readout screen, storing both under a hatch on the grasshopper’s floor. Then he put on his helmet and let the suit carry out the usual diagnostics before he started evacuation. A few seconds later the outer bulkhead opened. He climbed onto the hopper, took out his computer, clipped it on at the side of the control panel and opened the outer hatch.
The device with the readout began to sweep and search.
Calmly, he punched coordinates into the grasshopper. The LPCS would help him find the package. He was relieved to see that it was still communicating, for otherwise there would have been no chance of finding it in this wasteland of rifts and chasms. The electronic systems were all working, so the problem must be mechanical. A burst of propulsion, and the grasshopper lifted and accelerated. If he wasn’t to lose height he constantly had to create lift, while the nozzles twisted and turned to steer him. A flyer like the grasshopper was by its nature limited to a certain radius, but it was an advantage here that there was no air to provide lift for winged flyers – it meant that there was also no atmospheric pressure to brake the hopper once it got started. It had a top speed of eighty kilometres an hour, and the little round tanks could carry it an astonishing distance.
The signal was reaching him from just six kilometres away. Here in the shadow of the crater wall he was as good as blind, and totally dependent on the weak cones of light from his headlamps, racing ahead as though trying to lose him. Only the hopper’s radar system kept him from colliding with cliff edges or overhangs. A good distance away, the sunny expanses of the lowland plain met the sharp black line of the mountain shadow, and high above him blinding sunlight capped the peaks of the crater ridge. The tracks of the Lunar Express had a way back swung off between the cliffs to the next valley and the gentle plain that led up to the heights of Peary. The package should long since have been under way there of its own accord, but its signal called to Hanna from the other direction entirely, deep in the crater base.
He choked back his lift. The grasshopper lost height, its fingers of light showing deeply rutted rock. Huge sharp-edged blocks of stone reared up around him, unnerving indications that an avalanche had thundered down into the valley here not long ago – no, not thundered, had tumbled down in utter silence – then the landscape levelled off and the receiver told him that he had reached his destination. Just a few more metres.
Hanna activated the braking jets and peered about with his headlamps for a place to land. Obviously he hadn’t reached the foot of the crater wall here. The surface below was still too rubble-strewn and fissured to set the grasshopper down safely. By the time he had finally found a halfway level stretch, he was forced to hike back, leaping and sliding, a kilometre and a half, constantly at risk of losing his balance and slicing open his spacesuit on the razor-sharp blocks of stone all around. The beam from his helmet lamp wandered aimlessly over heaps of colourless rubble. Several times he had to fight for balance, raising clouds of the fine powdery moon dust, charged with static that made it cling stubbornly to his legs. Gravel leapt out of his path, uncannily alive, and then the ground below him simply stopped and the light was drowned in featureless blackness. He halted where he was, switched off the helmet lamp, opened his eyes wide and waited.
The effect was overwhelming.
A billion points of light in the Milky Way above him. No light pollution from any artificial source. Only the grasshopper far behind, a glowing dot marking its position. Hanna was as alone on the Moon as a human being could ever be. Nothing that he had ever experienced came even close, and for a while he even forgot his mission. That membrane that divides a human being from the experiential universe around him melted away. He became bodiless, at one with the non-dual world. All things were Hanna, all things were at rest within him, and he was within all things. He remembered a sadhu, a monk, telling him years ago that if he wished, he could drink the Indian Ocean dry at one gulp, a claim that Hanna had found cryptic at the time. And now he was standing here – was he standing? – drinking in the whole universe.
He waited.
After a while the hoped-for change set in, and the darkness proved less impenetrable than he had feared. There were photons travelling within it, reflected from the sunlit crater wall opposite that lunged upward from the plain. His surroundings took shape like a photograph in a bath of developing fluid, more a matter of intuition than perception, but it was enough to reveal that what he had thought to be a slope at his feet was only a sinkhole, which he could get round with just a few steps. He switched the headlamp back on. The spell was banished. He had come back to his senses and set out, keeping an eye on the computer display screen, so deep in concentration that he only saw the object when he was practically on top of it.
A heavy rod, rearing upwards!
Hanna tottered, dropping his toolkit and receiver. What was that? The beacon was at least 300 metres out! The thing had almost shattered his visor. Cursing, he began to work his way around it. A little later he knew that it was no fault of the beacon’s. This heap of scrap
was irrelevant. It was a four-legged transporter crate, its tanks burnt out, lying on its side and partially hidden by rubble. His mission had been to fetch the contents, what the organisation called the package, the part of the delivery that was actually sending the signal, and bring it to the pole.
But the package wasn’t here.
It had to be further down.
When he finally found it, jammed in between boulders, it was a sorry sight. Parts of the side panel had opened up and legs and nozzles sprouted from within, some of them twisted or snapped. Fuel tanks clung to the underbelly like fat insect eggs. Obviously the package had begun to unfold and come to life as it had been designed to do, in order to make its way to deployment, when something unforeseen had happened.
And suddenly Hanna knew what that had been.
His eyes drifted over to the brightly lit peaks. He had no doubt that right from the start, the landing unit had set down too close to the crater’s edge. Not a problem in itself. The designers had built in extra tolerances, including for the event that the carrier and its package crashed in the crater. The mechanical parts were supposed to be protected for as long as it took for the sensors to report that it was in a stable position, or give any other indication that the landing had been successful. After which the package was supposed to separate from the undercarriage, unfold its legs once it was at rest, and scuttle away. Obviously the sensors had made their report, but at the very moment the limbs were unfolding, parts of the uphill slope had slipped, carrying the robot along with it. The onrushing rocks had shattered its extremities, and the package had lost all mobility.
Moonquake?
Possibly. The Moon was nothing like the calm and placid place that had once been thought. Laymen might not believe it, but there were frequent tremors. Enormous variations in temperature built up tensions which discharged themselves in massive quakes, and the gravitational pull of sun and Earth could tug at deep-lying strata of the moonrock, which was why Gaia had been built to withstand quakes topping 5 on the Richter scale. Hanna inspected the damaged axles and nozzles, wanting to leave no possibility untried. After twenty sweaty minutes of wrestling with the wreck, he had to concede that there was no fixing it. The loss of some of the spider legs might have been overcome, but the unwelcome fact was that one of the jet nozzles was partially torn away, and another was nowhere to be seen.