The rails began to vibrate mightily. Grand Cherokee clambered onward, choking out the word ‘Please!’ over and over like a mantra, ‘Please, please, please—’ in sync with the thrumming of the rail.
‘Please—’ – Raddangg – ‘Please—’ – Raddangg—
He came round the pillar. He could see the steel bridge not ten metres in front of him, leading from the rails to the wall of the building.
The dragon swept down from the roof.
‘Please—’
The train hurtled down, thunderous, deafening, into the depths, then coiled in on itself in the loop and shot upwards. The whole structure was moving, shaking. The rails seemed to dance to and fro before Grand Cherokee’s eyes. He stood up, managed to leap across several spars at once and keep his balance despite the tilt.
Five metres. Four.
The dragon rushed down in the loop.
Three metres.
– shot round the corner—
Two.
– flew towards him.
In the moment that the train crossed the point where the bridge led off, Grand Cherokee did the impossible, a superhuman feat. Howling wildly, he leapt clear, an enormous standing jump. The sharp bow of the front carriage passed below him. He stretched out his arms to grab hold of one of the seats, touched something, lost his grip. His body smashed into the backs of the seats in the next row, was flung high, pirouetted and for a moment seemed to be heading into the deep blue sky, as though he had decided to reach outer space.
Then he fell.
The last thing that went through Grand Cherokee’s head was that he had at least tried.
That he hadn’t been so bad after all.
Xin craned his head. High above him he could see people going into the glass viewing platform. The corridor would be opened soon as well. Time to get going. He knew how things worked in high-rise surveillance control rooms, he knew that hardly anybody would have glanced at the monitors in the last quarter of an hour. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have seen much. Leaving aside the two moments when Wang had suddenly dropped to the control room floor, they had been standing close beside one another most of the time. Two close friends having a chat.
But now he had set the dragon moving. Before the usual time. That would be noticed. He had to get out of here.
Xin hesitated.
Then he quickly wiped his fingerprints from the display with his sleeve, paused, and also wiped the places where Grand Cherokee had fumbled about with his greasy fingers. Otherwise those blasted smears would haunt his dreams. There were some things that tended to cling to the inside of Xin’s skull like leeches. Lastly, he hurried along the corridor and left it the way they had come. In the lift he peeled the wig from his head, took off his glasses, tore the moustache from his upper lip and turned his jacket inside out. It had been made specially for him, reversible. The grey jacket became sandy beige, and he stuffed the wig, beard and glasses inside. He decided to change lifts in the Sky Lobby on the twenty-eighth floor, then went down to the basement, through the shopping mall and out into the bright sunshine. Outside he saw people running towards the south side of the building. Cries went up. Somebody shouted that there had been a suicide.
Suicide? All okay then.
As Xin walked onward, faster, under the trees in the park, he took out the detective’s card.
27 May 2025
PHANTOMS
Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon
Julian set great store by his inventive genius that generated so many extraordinary ideas, and in particular by the fact that he could simply choose to switch the thinking process on and off. If unsolved problems tried to join him under the covers, he chose to sleep, and was wafted away on the wings of slumber as soon as his head touched the pillow. Sleep was a cornerstone of his mental and physical health, and up until now, he had always slept excellently well on the Moon.
Just not tonight.
The discussion at dinner was going round and round in his head like the horses on a merry-go-round; more precisely, Walo Ögi’s remark asking why he didn’t simply announce a divorce with Washington and declare that his technologies were up for sale to all comers, offering global access. It was true that there was a difference between taking the best offer and taking every offer. There was, even, a moral distinction. Playing favourites when it came to the wellbeing of ten billion people laid him open to charges of perfidious profiteering, even if not every one of these ten billion was in a position to build a space elevator in the front garden – charges that were unpalatable to a man who outdid all others in arguing for his autonomy as a businessman, who made speeches about global responsibility and the destructive effects of rivalry.
Tonight Julian lay awake because he saw all his private thoughts and arguments confirmed once more. Especially since, aside from all moral considerations, to make his patents generally available would not only boost economic activity on the Moon, it would also mean better business for him. The Swiss investor had put his finger on it: if another three or four nations had a space elevator, and were mining helium-3, the global switch to aneutronic fusion would be complete within a few years. Orley Enterprises, or more exactly Orley Space, could help the less wealthy countries with finance to build their elevators, which would give Orley Fusion the chance to acquire exclusive concessions for their power network. The reactor business would turn a profit and Orley Energy would become the biggest power provider on the planet. He would just have to deal with the fact that Washington would be less than happy about all this.
But it was a little more complicated than that.
Zheng Pang-Wang had tried several times to woo him for Beijing, which Julian had flatly refused until one occasion when they were having lunch together at Hakkasan, the exclusive Chinese restaurant in London, and Julian realised that he would only be betraying his American partners if he jumped into bed with one other trading partner. If on the other hand he offered his goods to everybody, this would effectively be the same as offering everybody in the world a Toyota or a Big Mac. Obviously Washington would see things a little differently. They would argue that they had signed a deal based on mutual advantage, a deal where – to continue the fast food metaphor – he supplied the burger while the government provided the bun, since neither could act on their own without the other’s support.
In a sudden fit of chattiness, he had shared his thoughts with Zheng.
The old fellow nearly dropped his chopsticks.
‘No, no, no, honourable friend! You may have a wife and a concubine. Does the concubine want to change anything about the fact that you are married? Not at all. She’s happy to share this pleasant way of life with the wife, but she will very quickly lose all taste for this at the thought you may take other mistresses. China has invested too much. We observe regretfully but respectfully that you feel obliged to your lawful partner, but if space elevators were suddenly to sprout up like beanstalks all over, and everybody were to stake a claim on the Moon, that would be a problem of a different magnitude. Beijing would be most concerned.’