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‘How tall are you?’ O’Keefe asked, disconcerted.

‘Six foot three.’

‘Hmm.’ The Irishman rubbed his chin. ‘I’m five foot nine.’

‘Could be a near thing. Heidrun?’

‘One hundred and seventy-eight – five foot ten. Whatever. Whoever doesn’t make it has to stand us all a meal.’

‘Forget it.’ O’Keefe waved the idea away. ‘It’s all free here anyway.’

‘Then back on Earth. Hey, in Zürich! All right with that? A round of schnitzels in the Kronenhalle.’

‘Meaning all of us!’ called Julian.

‘Good, we’ll all jump together,’ Hanna declared. ‘Make room, so we don’t get in one another’s way. You guys up there, get back! Ready!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Heidrun grinned. ‘Ready.’

‘And up we go!’

Hanna sprang powerfully upwards. It looked astonishingly easy. As calmly as a superhero, he flew towards the ledge, grabbed hold, boosted himself up again and landed on his feet. Next to him Heidrun fluttered down, struggling for balance. O’Keefe’s hands threatened to slip off the edge of the bridge, then he clambered up, as elegantly as circumstances allowed.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Kronenhalle is cancelled.’

‘You’re all invited anyway,’ Ögi called out, in the tones of a man who embraces the whole world. ‘This is the first time ever that a Swiss has taken a standing jump of four metres. We’ll meet again in Zürich!’

‘Optimist,’ said Lynn, so quietly that only Dana heard.

The hotel director was stunned. She acted as though she hadn’t caught that wan little word with its insidious undertones.

What was the matter with Orley’s daughter?

‘Please bear in mind,’ she said out loud to the group, ‘that in reduced gravity your body will be losing muscle mass. There are two guest lifts here in Gaia, the E1 and E2, and a staff lift, but we nevertheless recommend that you work out a lot and take the shortcut via the bridges as often as you can. Now we’ll tell you a little more about the facilities and show you the rooms.’

* * *

Hanna had Sophie Thiel show him all the secrets of his suite. There was no essential difference between the life-support systems here and those aboard the space station.

‘The temperature is set to twenty degrees Celsius, but that’s adjustable,’ Sophie Thiel explained with a wide-screen smile, pointing out a button by the door; she brushed so close past Hanna as she did so that it was only just within the limits of
professionalism. ‘Your suite has its own water management system, with wonderfully sterile water—’

‘Don’t use words like that to the customers,’ Hanna said, looking about and at the same time feeling her hungry gaze on his back. No two ways about it, this Thiel woman liked muscular men. ‘It sounds as if you’re setting out to poison somebody.’

‘Well then, let’s just call it fresh water. Ha ha.’

He turned to face her. Her eyes were half-moons, their colour barely discernible; on the other hand she looked as if she had a double ration of bright white teeth and inexhaustible reserves of laughter. She was not the least bit beautiful, but very pretty for all that. A grown-up version of Pippi Longstocking, or whatever that Swedish minx was called. He had found the film on a Sunday afternoon at a hotel in Germany, while he was waiting for hours on end for to meet somebody who had been floating dead in the Rhine all the while, and he had watched it all the way through, curiously moved. A childish, clunky old three-reeler, but the childhood it showed him was so amazingly different from his own that it was practically science fiction. He found himself unable to change channels. He’d never watched a kids’ movie before, or at least never one like this.

And he’d never watched another one.

Thiel showed him how the lighting was controlled, opened up a respectable mini-bar and told him the numbers to call if he needed anything. The look in her eyes said,
if only things were different
.
I’ve worked in the best hotels in the world. Never with guests.
You could hardly say that she put herself forward. She was friendly and professional, it’s just that she was also an open book.

But Hanna wasn’t here for fun and games.

‘If there’s anything else you’d like—’

‘No, not at the moment. I’ll manage.’

‘Oh, I almost forgot! You’ll find your moon slippers in the bottom of the wardrobe.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘We couldn’t think of a better name for them. They have lead plates in the soles, in case you want additional weight.’

‘Why would I want that?’

‘Some people prefer to move on the Moon the way they move on Earth.’

‘I see! Very far-sighted of you.’

The look in her eyes said,
unless you take a bit of trouble
.

‘Well then – till half past eight, in the Selene.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He waited until she’d gone. The suite displayed the same discreet, elegant sense of style as the lobby. Hanna didn’t know a great deal about design, nothing in fact, but even he could tell that this was the work of experts. After all, he’d had to learn
a little about style and appearances to take on this role. Also, he liked clean lines, simple rooms. Much as he loved India, he had always felt rather hemmed in by the local sense of decor, the way they crowded every surface with knick-knacks.

His gaze swept over to the window that took up the whole wall.

They couldn’t have found a better place for the hotel, he thought. The plateau below Gaia could be reached by lift, and from here he saw it stretching away towards the canyon, its tennis courts lost and lonely. You must have a fantastic view of the hotel from down there, it would look like a floodlit sculpture. Over on the left, where the cliffs dropped back and the canyon closed, a natural-seeming path curved away to the other side.

What was it that Julian Orley had said just now? Over on the other side of the Lunar Express tracks was the golf course.

A golf course on the Moon!

Suddenly Hanna felt a touch of regret that he wasn’t actually here as the person everybody thought he was. He crushed the feeling before it could get to work on him, opened his silver suitcase and delved into it for his computer, a touchscreen device of the usual sort, no bigger than a chocolate bar, and his washbag. He took an electric trimmer from the depths of the bag. With a practised twist, he clicked the trimmer apart and took out a tiny circuit board, which he plugged into the computer. Whistling tunelessly, he booted up and watched as the program uploaded and hooked into the LPCS.

A few seconds later the device alerted him that he had a message.

He opened his mailserver. The message was from a friend, reminding him not to forget Dexter and Stacey’s wedding. Unimpressed by the pending nuptials of a couple who didn’t exist anyway, he filtered out the white noise that made up the rest of the message and came up with a few more lines of text, nothing more than the addresses of several dozen internet sites. Then he uploaded a symbol – snaking reptilian necks, twisted and knotted together, all growing from a single body – and waited a moment.

Something was happening.

Words and syllables slotted together with lightning speed. The actual message took shape before his eyes. Even while the reconstruction was still under way, he knew there had been trouble. The text was short, but peremptory:

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.

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?’