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Landing unit. Uning landit.

Mini-nuke. Nuki-Duke. Muki-Nuki-Duki, Mini-Something-Something.

Bruce Dern in
Silent Running.

Great film. And at the end:
Boooooommmmmm!

No, she’ll stay here. And anyway, she’s out of strength. So many things have gone wrong. Sorry, Julian. Didn’t we want to go to the Moon? How is work going at the Stellar Island Hotel? What? Oh, shit, it’s not finished, that’s it, she knew it, she always knew, it’s not finished! It will
never
be finished. Never, never, never!

Cold.

The little robot watering the flowers with Bruce Dern. He’s sweet. On that platform in space, the last plants are on it before Dern blows himself up, and then there’s a song by that eco-trollop, Joan Baez, Julian says that every time he hears her he has the feeling somebody’s chiselling his head open, and she messes up the whole great finale with her hysterical soprano.

‘Lynn?’

There he is.

‘Please answer! Lynn! Lynn!’

Oh! Is he crying? Why? Her fault? Did she do something wrong?

Don’t cry, Julian. Come on, let’s look at another one of those ropy old movies.
Armageddon
. No, he doesn’t like that one, everything about it’s wrong, he says, there’s too much wrong, so how about Ed Wood,
Plan 9 from Outer Space
, or how about
It Came from Outer Space
? Come on, that one’s cool! Jack Arnold, the old fairy-tale uncle. Always good for a joke or a horror story. The extraterrestrials with the big brains. That’s what they really look like.

Really? Nonsense. They don’t!

Do so too!

Daddy! Tim doesn’t think they look like that.

‘Lynn!’

Coming. I’m coming, Daddy.

I’m there.

3–8 June 2025

A perfectly normal life—

Hanging pictures, taking a step back, adjusting the angle. Sorting out books, arranging furniture, stepping back, rearranging. Making small changes, stepping back again, approaching things while remaining detached from them, establishing harmony, the universal Confucian formula against the powers of chaos.

If that was what constituted a normal life, Jericho had fitted himself back into normality without the slightest transition. Xin hadn’t burned down his loft, everything was in its place or waiting to be assigned one. The television was on, a kaleidoscope of soundless world events, because he was less concerned with the content of information than with its decorative properties. He had an urgent need not to have to know anything any more. He didn’t want to understand any more connections, only to roll out the little carpet, which was to lie like
that
– or was it better like
that
? Jericho pulled it into a diagonal, took a step back, studied his work and found it lacked balance, because it put a standard lamp in difficulties. Not harmonious, said Confucius, stressing the rights of lamps.

How was Yoyo?

At noon on the day of her rebirth thanks to Xin’s mercy she had woken up, plagued by severe headaches, doubtless partly due to the encounter with Norrington’s skull, also to an unaccustomed excess of Brunello di Montalcino, but finally also to the experience of having been practically shot. The resulting emotional hangover meant that she didn’t talk much on the flight home. At around midday Tu had started the Aerion Supersonic. Four hours later the jet had landed at Pudong Airport, and they had been home again. Of course, in the days that followed there was no escaping the news coverage. Once the Charon had come within range of terrestrial broadcasting, measurements had been confirmed corroborating that there had been a nuclear explosion in the no man’s land of the lunar North Pole, and the outing of the tour group had ended in disaster, with some prominent fatalities. And although the Secret Services tried to spread a cloak of silence over the events, there were rumours of a conspiracy aimed at destroying the American lunar base, with China as a possible source – totally unconsidered assertions that buzzed cheerfully around the net.

Downwinds of suspicion blew anti-Chinese ideas all around the world. In fact
there wasn’t the slightest concrete evidence concerning the real masterminds behind it. Orley himself had taken the sting from the suspicions on the way back to OSS, announcing that it was only with the help of the taikonaut Jia Keqiang and the Chinese space authorities that it had been possible to prevent the attack at all. Regardless of this, British, American and Chinese media used the vocabulary of aggression. Not for the first time, China had attacked foreign networks, and it was common knowledge that Beijing administered Kim Jong Un’s military legacy. Voices warning that the space-travelling nations should finally pull together mingled with fears about the armament of space. Zheng Pang-Wang found himself in a public relations crisis when details emerged about the role of the Zheng Group in the construction of the launching pad in Equatorial Guinea. Rushing ahead, the Zhong Chan Er Bu made clear that nothing was known about anyone called Kenny Xin or an organisation called Yü Shen, which supposedly drew its recruits from psychiatric institutions and mental hospitals and trained them up as killers. But if this man Xin did exist, he was operating unambiguously against the interests of the Party. And why were Mr Orley and the Americans really surprised, when they withheld important technologies from the world and snubbed the international community with continued violations of the treaty concerning the Moon and space? This all sounded so familiar in terms of the lunar crisis that serious considerations about what the Chinese actually stood to gain from the destruction of Peary Base (nothing at all, according to seasoned analysts) faded into the background.

Standard lamp and carpet. Harmony refused to establish itself between the two.

Although her shared flat had gained an extra room after Grand Cherokee Wang’s demise, Yoyo had moved in with Tu. Temporarily, she stressed. Perhaps she wanted to stand by Hongbing, who was also staying in the villa until his own apartment had been refurbished, but Jericho suspected she was hoping for something like a confession after the openness of the last few days. She was preparing to resume her studies. Daxiong was working on his bike, disregarding medical advice, as if he didn’t have a freshly stitched wound in his back and an even bigger one in his heart, Tu devoted himself to the steam-train rhythm of his businesses, and pleasantly boring cases of web espionage awaited Jericho. After Operation Mountains of Eternal Light had come to such a bloody end, they had agreed that Hydra no longer posed a threat. They still faced questioning by the Chinese police, but did not feel obliged to reveal the circumstances under which Yoyo had come across the message fragment, particularly since the Secret Services had every reason to be grateful to them: in the end, what was more likely to exonerate Beijing from the accusations that were flying around than that the attack had been scuppered by the feisty actions of two Chinese and an Englishman living in China? The first three days of June had passed uneventfully,
and Patrice Ho, Jericho’s high-ranking policeman friend from Shanghai, had called to announce his promotion and his move to Beijing.

‘Of course I know that your investigations gave a great boost to my career,’ he said. ‘So if you have any idea of how I can pay you back—’

‘Let’s just see it as a credit,’ said Jericho.

‘Hmm.’ Ho paused. ‘Perhaps I can come up with a way of increasing that credit.’

‘Aha.’

‘As you know, our investigations in Lanzhou were highly successful. We were able to take out a nest of paedophiles, and came across evidence that suggests—’

‘Hang on a second! You want me to go on poking around in the paedophile scene?’

‘Your experience might be very useful to us. Beijing places a lot of hope in me. After the double success in Shenzhen and Lanzhou, it might provoke irritation if our series of triumphs suddenly came to an end—’

‘I understand,’ sighed Jericho. ‘At the risk of squandering my credit, I’ve decided not to take on any more jobs of that kind. A few days ago I moved into a larger flat, and it’s already too small for all the ghosts I have lodging with me.’

‘You won’t have to go to the front line,’ Ho hurried to reassure him.

‘You know one
always
ends up on the front line.’

‘Of course. Sorry if I’ve put you under extra pressure.’

‘You haven’t. Can I think about it?’

‘Of course! When are we going to go for a beer?’

‘What about this week?’

‘Wonderful.’

Nothing was wonderful. The carpet and the standard lamp understood one another marvellously well. The point was that neither of them was in harmony with
him
. There was no harmony anywhere, and certainly no normality. As if by way of confirmation, Julian Orley’s face appeared larger than life-size on the holowall, against the open sky and surrounded by people. He was saying something as he pushed his way through the crowd, followed by the actor Finn O’Keefe and a thrillingly weird-looking woman with snow-white hair. Clearly the tour group had come back to Earth. Jericho turned up the sound and heard the commentator say:

‘—the explosion of the second mini-nuke at nine o’clock Central European time at a distance of 45,000 kilometres from the OSS, which it was clearly designed to destroy. Meanwhile fears are being raised that the series of nuclear attacks might resume. Julian Orley, who plans to leave Quito in the next few minutes, has so far refused—’

Jericho gave a start and turned the sound up again, but he seemed to have missed
the most important bit. A news-ticker along the bottom of the screen carried the message of an attempted nuclear attack on the OSS, and said that the number of victims was as yet unknown. Jericho zapped through the channels. Clearly there had been a second atom bomb hidden on the shuttle that had carried the survivors from the Peary Base to the space station, but this had been discovered in time and detonated at a considerable distance from the OSS. Orley himself said that he didn’t plan to comment in any way. Jericho thought he had aged several years.

Yoyo called. ‘Did you hear that? The stuff about the second bomb?’

He switched from CNN to a Chinese news channel, but it was running a story about university reform. Another one was trying to talk down new Uyghur revolts in Xinjiang.

‘Very strange,’ he said. ‘Vogelaar didn’t mention a second bomb in his dossier.’

‘That means he only knew about one.’

‘Probably.’ The BBC was showing a special report on the events. ‘Luckily it’s nothing to do with us any more.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. God, I’m glad we’re out of that! And that they’re leaving us in peace – On the other hand, it’s awesome, isn’t it? It’s
really
awesome!’

Jericho stared at the red strip of the news-ticker.

‘Mm-hm,’ he said. ‘Everything else okay with you?’

‘Yep, fine.’ She hesitated. ‘By the way, I’m sorry I haven’t called, but there’s so much happening at the moment, I’m – I’m just trying to get back in step. It’s not that easy. I’ve got funerals of friends to go to, Daxiong is acting the hero, and my father – okay, we had a long talk, I think you know what about—’

These topics were always awkward. ‘And?’ he asked cautiously.

‘It’s all right, Owen, we can talk openly about it. You can’t tell me anything I haven’t found out already. What can I say? I’m glad he told me.’

She sounded oddly terse. She had suffered from Hongbing’s silence all her life, and now all she could find to say was that she was
glad
that he was suddenly communicating openly with her.

‘Hey!’ she said suddenly. ‘You do understand that
we
prevented those attacks? Without us there would be no moon base, and no OSS.’

A German channel. The same wobbly pictures of Orley and his group flickered across the holowall. A journalist with a microphone in his hand and the Pacific in the background claimed to have heard that a bomb had gone off on a spaceship, a moon shuttle, and that contrary to the initial reports there
had
been fatalities, at least one.

‘Just think about it – that would have set American space travel back by decades,’ Yoyo observed. ‘Wouldn’t it? What do you think? No space lift, no helium-3. Orley could have mothballed his fusion reactors.’

‘It almost looks as if we’re heroes,’ he said sourly.

‘Yeah. So we can cautiously start being proud of ourselves, can we? What are your plans for this evening?’

‘Shifting furniture. Sleeping.’ Jericho glanced at his watch. Half past ten. ‘Hopefully. I’ve been exhausted for three days and can’t get to sleep. Only towards the morning, for two or three hours.’

‘I’m the same. Take a pill.’

‘Don’t want to.’

‘Then it’s your own fault. See you later.’

After the call he no longer felt able to think in categories of Confucian interior design. Everything around him seemed to have lost its meaning, he could imagine any arrangement of furniture and none. A glass wall had appeared between him and the objects, harmony and normality became purely academic categories, as if a blind man were talking about colours. He turned off the television and found his jaws stretching into an endless, leonine yawn. According to Schopenhauer, the hero of his youth:
Yawning is one of the reflex movements. I suspect that its more distant cause may be a momentary depotentiation of the brain caused by boredom, mental slackness or somnolence.

Was he bored? Was his brain growing slack? Was he depotentiated? Not at all. He was unsettlingly wide awake. He lay down fully dressed on the couch, turned out the light and tentatively closed his eyes. Perhaps if he avoided official actions like getting undressed or going to bed, he might trick his body and mind, which seemed to think that they had to resist sleep the more clearly he attempted to achieve it.

Half an hour later he knew better.

It wasn’t over. Hydra still held him in its embrace, its poison would rage in him until he had finally understood its nature. He couldn’t pretend that none of it concerned him any longer just because no one was trying to kill him. You couldn’t
decide
on normality; things didn’t come to an end just because you’d buried them in the past. The nightmare continued.