Limit (69 page)

‘Listen, I feel a bit silly.’ He waited till Funaki was busy, and lowered his voice. ‘But I’ve got to ask you something. When we met in the corridor this morning, you were coming from the station.’

Hanna nodded.

‘And?’ Julian asked.

‘And what?’

‘Did you take a look inside?’

‘Inside the concourse? Once. Through the window.’ Hanna thought. ‘After that I went into one of the gangways. You remember, I was a bit dozy when it came to looking for the exits.’

‘And did you – did you see anything in the concourse?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I mean, the train, was it there? Did it set off, did it pull in?’

‘What, the Lunar Express? No.’

‘So it was just parked there.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And you’re a hundred per cent sure about that?’

‘I didn’t see anything else. So why do you feel silly?’

‘Because – oh, this really isn’t the place.’ And he just told Hanna the whole story, simply out of a need to get rid of it.

‘Maybe it was one of those flashes we all see up here,’ said Hanna.

Julian knew what he was referring to. High-energy particles, protons and heavy atomic nuclei, occasionally broke through the armour of spaceships and space stations, reacted with atoms in the eye and caused brief flashes of light that were perceived on the retina, but only if you had your eyes shut. Over time you got used to it, until you barely noticed them. Behind the regolith plating of the bedroom they hardly ever occurred. But in the living room—

Funaki set the cocktail down in front of him. Julian stared at the glass without really seeing it.

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘You just made a mistake,’ said Hanna. ‘If you want my advice, you should apologise to Lynn and forget the whole thing.’

But Julian couldn’t forget it. Something was wrong, something didn’t fit. He
knew without question
that he had seen something, just not the train. Something more subtle was bothering him, a crucial detail that proved he wasn’t fantasising. There was a second inner movie that would explain everything if he could just drag it out of his unconscious and look at it, look at it very precisely to understand what he had already seen and just hadn’t understood, whether he liked the explanation or not.

He
had
to remember.

Remember!

Loreena Keowa was irritated. On the day of the boat-trip, Palstein had agreed to let the film crew come along, and had delivered a series of powerful quotes, although without giving her that sense of familiarity that she usually developed with her interviewees. By now she knew that Palstein loved the crystalline aesthetic of numbers, with which he rationalised everything and everyone, himself included, although without losing the emotional dimension in his dealings with people. He esteemed the sound-mathematics of a composer like Johann Sebastian Bach, the fractal Minimalism of Steve Reich, and he was also fascinated by the breakdown of all structures and narrative arcs in the music of György Ligeti. He had a Steinway grand, he played well if a bit mechanically, not classics, as Loreena would have expected, but the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Billy Joel and Elvis Costello. He owned prints by Mondrian, but also an incredibly intense original by Pollock, which looked as if its creator had screamed at the canvas in paint.

Curious to meet Palstein’s wife, Loreena had finally shaken the hand of a gracious creature who commandeered her, dragged her through the Japanese garden she had designed herself for a quarter of an hour and laughed like a bell every now and again for no perceptible reason. Mrs Palstein was an architect, she learned, and had laid out most of the grounds herself. Determined to use the currency of her newly acquired training in small talk, Loreena asked her about Mies van der Rohe, receiving a mysterious smile in return. Suddenly Mrs Palstein was treating her as a co-conspirator. Van der Rohe, oh, yes! Did she want to stay to dinner? While she was considering whether or not to agree, the lady’s phone rang, and she went off in a conversation about migraine, forgetting Loreena so completely that she found her own way back to the house and, because Palstein had issued no similar invitation, left without dinner.

Afterwards, in Juneau, she had admitted to herself that she liked the oil manager, his kindness, his good manners, his melancholy expression, which made her feel strangely exposed, and at the same time made him seem a little weird – and yet she still found him very alien, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. Instead of devoting herself to her report, she had plunged into research, had flown from Texas to Calgary, Alberta, dropping in unannounced on the police station there. With her Native-American face and her peculiar charm, she managed to get to the office of the police lieutenant, who promised to keep her informed about any progress in
investigations. Loreena extended her antennae for undertones, and established that there had been no progress, thanked him, took the next flight back to Juneau and, on the way, told her editorial team she wanted them to collect all available footage about what had happened in Calgary. After she landed, she called an intern to her office and told him what they had to look for.

‘I realise,’ she said, ‘that the police have viewed and analysed all the pictures a hundred times. So let’s look at them another hundred times. Or two hundred if it helps.’

On her desk she spread out a few prints showing the square in front of Imperial Oil headquarters. At the time of the shooting, the complex of buildings opposite had lain empty for months, after the open-cast mining company based there had come to a miserable end.

‘The police conclude for a whole host of reasons that the shot was fired from the middle one of the three buildings, which are, incidentally, all interconnected. Probably from one of the upper storeys. The complex has entrances to the front, the sides and the back, so there are several possible ways of getting in and out again.’

‘You really think we’ll discover something that the cops have missed?’

‘Be optimistic,’ said Loreena. ‘Always look on the bright side.’

‘I’ve taken a look at the material, Loreena. Almost all the cameras were trained on the crowd and the podium. It was only after the shooting that some of them were clever enough to swing around to the complex, but you don’t see anyone coming out.’

‘So who says we have to concentrate on the complex? The police are doing that. I want us to concentrate on the crowd in the square.’

‘You mean the guy who did it went from there into the building?’

‘I mean that you’re a bit of a male chauvinist. It could have been a girl, couldn’t it?’

‘A killer chick, huh?’ giggled the intern.

‘Carry on like that and you’ll meet one in person. Look at every individual figure in the square. I want to know if anyone filmed the building before, during and after the attack.’

‘Oh, God! This is slave labour!’

‘Stop whining. Jump to it. I’ll take care of Youtube, Facebook, Smallworld and so on.’

After the intern had started viewing the material, she had set about compiling a list of all significant decisions that Palstein had made or advocated over the past six months. She also recorded his resistance to the interests of others. She logged on to forums and blogs, followed the internet debate about closures, acquiescence on the one hand, helpless rage on the other, along with the desire to give the oilmen a good kicking, ideally to put them up against the wall right away, but none of these
entries raised a suspicion that its author was in any way connected with the attack. The people involved in open-cast mining were bitter about it, but glad that it was coming to an end, particularly in the Indian communities. It struck her that the Chinese had been taking a great interest in Canadian oil sand over the past two decades, and had put a lot of money into open-cast mining, which they were now losing, and that regardless of the helium-3 revolution they were still, albeit to a waning degree, dependent on oil and gas. On the other hand there was now so much cheap oil available that anything else seemed more sensible than extracting it in the most unprofitable way imaginable. When, in the early hours of the morning, she finally found no more press information and no more postings, she compiled a file about Orley Enterprises, or more precisely about Palstein’s attempts to become involved with Orley Energy and Orley Space.

And suddenly she had an idea.

Dog-tired, she set about backing up her newly fledged theory with arguments. They weren’t particularly new: someone was trying to undermine Palstein’s involvement with Orley. Except that she suddenly realised, clear as day, that the purpose of the attack had been to keep Palstein from travelling to the Moon.

If that was so—

But why? What would Palstein have had to discuss with Julian Orley on the Moon that they couldn’t have sorted out on Earth? Or did it have something to do with other people he was supposed to meet there?

She needed the list of participants.

Her eyes stung. Palstein wasn’t supposed to fly to the Moon. The thought stayed with her. It continued in confused dreams, the kind you get when you fall asleep in office chairs, it produced visions in her alarmingly cracked brain, of people in spacesuits shooting at each other from designer buildings, with her caught in the middle.

‘Hey, Loreena.’

‘Mies is very popular on the Moon,’ she mumbled.

‘Meeces? Love ’em to pieces.’ Someone laughed. She’d been talking nonsense. Blinking and stiff-limbed, she came to. The intern was leaning on the edge of the desk and looked as pleased as punch.

‘Shit,’ she murmured. ‘I dozed off.’

‘Yeah, you look like a slaughtered animal. All that’s missing is the knife-handle sticking out of your chest. Come on, Pocahontas, get a cup of coffee down you. We’ve got something! I think we’ve
really
got something!’

28 May 2025

At around one o’clock, Jericho had had his fourth phone conversation with Zhao, who was at that instant watching a mass brawl and assured him that he was enjoying himself enormously.

Net-junkies came and went. Some made the move to the honeycomb sleeping modules. Almost the entire population of the Cyber Planet was male – women were a vanishingly small minority and most of them were pretty long in the tooth. For Jericho, the only halfway healthy-looking people were the users of the full-motion suits and the treadmills, who were forced to take a bit of exercise as they explored virtual universes. Many of them spent their time in parallel worlds like Second Life and Future Earth, or in the Evolutionarium, where they could pretend to be animals, from dinosaurs all the way down to bacteria. Some of the reclining figures moved their sensor-covered hands, drew cryptic patterns in the empty air, a clue that they were attempting to play an active part in something or other. The overwhelming majority didn’t lift a finger. They had reached the terminal stage, reduced to being observers of their own extended agonies.

Strangely, the atmosphere had a cathartic effect on Jericho, in which Zhao’s defamations melted away to nothing. The net zombies seemed to stir themselves, letting him know it just took an insignificant effort of will to end the status of his loneliness; they pointed at him with desiccated fingers, accused him of flirting with sadness, of having walled himself up in the past and brought about his own misery; they sent him back to life which, so far, hadn’t been
nearly
as bad as he thought. He made a thousand resolutions, soap-bubbles on whose surfaces the future iridesced. In a strange way the Cyber Planet brought him comfort. Then, as if on cue, Zhao called, claiming he just wanted to know how Jericho was getting on.

He was getting on just fine, Jericho replied.

And again he waited. Even though he had plenty of experience of staring stoically at a single spot, the comings and goings in the market were starting to bore him. People ate and drank, haggled, hung around, hooked up, laughed or got into arguments. The night belonged to the gangsters, it was here that they brought the day’s bounty back into the cycle of greed, albeit quite peacefully. He started to envy Zhao his punch-up, decided to rely entirely on the scanners for a while, connected the hologoggles up to his phone and logged in to Second Life. The
market vanished, making way for a boulevard with bistros, shops and a cinema. Using his phone’s touchscreen, Jericho guided his avatar down the street. In this world he was dark-skinned, he had long, black hair and he was called Juan Narciso Ucañan, a name he’d read years ago in some disaster novel or other. Three good-looking young women were sitting at a table in the sun, all with transparent wings and filigree antennae above their eyes.

‘Hi,’ he said to one of them.

She looked up and beamed at him. Jericho’s avatar was a masterpiece of programming, and even by the high standards of Second Life, unusually attractive.

‘My name’s Juan,’ he said. ‘I’m new here.’

‘Inara,’ she said. ‘Inara Gold.’

‘You’re looking great, Inara. Do you fancy a totally awesome experience?’

The avatar that called itself Inara hesitated. That hesitation was typical of the woman hiding behind it. ‘I’m here with my girlfriends,’ she said evasively.

‘Well, I’d love to,’ said one of them.

‘Me too,’ laughed the other one.

‘Okay, let’s the four of us all do something.’ Jericho Juan put on a wide smile. ‘But first I need to discuss something with the most beautiful one. Inara.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I’ve got a surprise for you.’ He pointed to an empty chair. ‘Can I sit down here?’

She nodded. Her big, golden eyes looked at him steadily. He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

‘Could we be undisturbed for a moment, beautiful Inara? Just the two of us?’

‘It’s not up to me, sweetie.’

‘We’re just going anyway,’ one of the girlfriends said and got to her feet. The other sent a snake-tongue darting from between her teeth, fished an insect out of the air, swallowed it and gave an offended hiss. They both spread their wings and disappeared behind a puff of pink clouds. Inara struck a pose and stretched her ribcage. The fabric of the tight top she was wearing started to become transparent.