‘I’ll be right with you,’ he said. ‘Just a moment.’
Silencer, the thought ran through her head.
He smiled in a rather businesslike manner as he walked past her, stepped up to the intern and fired three shots at him, until the boy stopped moving. It went pop, pop, pop. Loreena opened her mouth because she wanted to scream, to wail, to call for help, but only an ebbing sigh escaped her chest. Every breath was torture. She struggled forwards, propped her elbows in the grass and crawled towards the stone with the phone on it.
The man came back, picked it up and put it in his pocket.
She gave up. Rolled onto her back, blinked into the sun and thought how right Palstein had been. How close they had been, how bloody close! Lars Gudmundsson’s head and torso entered her field of vision, the muzzle of his pistol.
‘You’re very clever,’ he said. ‘A very clever woman.’
‘I know,’ groaned Loreena.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all – it’s all on the net,’ she murmured. ‘It’s all—’
‘We’ll check that,’ he said in a friendly voice, and pulled the trigger.
Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon
Nina Hedegaard tried to catch a thousand birds as she sweated away in the Finnish sauna, in a state of mounting frustration. Everywhere she saw the peacock plumage of affluence, heard a twittering exchange about nests and young, and imagined that carefree daydreaming that was only possible in Julian’s world. A thousand wonderful, wildly fluttering thoughts. But Julian wasn’t there, and the birds refused to be lured into the pen of her life-plans. Whenever she thought she was holding at least a sparrow, after Julian had murmured something that sounded halfway authoritative in her ear, even that little hope escaped and joined all the other ideas, enticingly close and at the same time unattainably far off, of her inflamed imagination. By now she had serious doubts about Julian’s honesty. As if he didn’t know full well that she had hopes. Why couldn’t he confess openly to her? Did he have an act of adultery to conceal, social ostracism to fight against? Not a bit of it; he was single, just as she was single, good-looking and lovable single, not rich, perhaps, but then he was rich himself, so what was the problem?
Her frustration seeped like dew from every pore, collected on her forearms, breasts and belly. She furiously distributed layer after layer of warm sweat, let her hands circle around her inner thighs, her fingers working their way slowly to the middle, settling in her crotch, twitching, untameable, abject, pleasure-seeking digits. Shocking! Along with her fury, she was seized with a furious desire to make the absent figure present in her mind, and— but that was impossible, absolutely out of the question.
To cut a long story short, Julian just wanted to fuck her. That was it. He felt nothing, he didn’t love. He just wanted to fuck a nice little Danish astronaut if he felt like it. Just as he fucked the whole world when he felt like it.
Stupid idiot!
She violently pulled her hands away, pressed them to the edge of the wooden bench beside her hips and looked out at the wonder of the gorge with its pastel-coloured surfaces and uncompromising shadows. Thousands upon thousands of bright, frozen stars suddenly seemed more attainable than the life that she would have liked to live by his side. She wasn’t concerned with his money, or rather it wasn’t really about the money, even though she didn’t necessarily scorn it. No, she wanted a place in that vision-filled brain, capable of dreaming up space lifts, she wanted to be Julian’s personal stroke of genius, his most brilliant idea, and to be seen as such by the world, as the woman he desired. She hadn’t just fucked her way to that, she’d earned it!
Telling him things like that was the reason she was sitting here. Without wanting to put any pressure on him, of course. Just a bit of homeopathically prescribed planning for the future, allied to what she saw as the dazzlingly attractive option of an act of love in the sauna, as soon as the Ganymede landed. That was what they had agreed, and Julian had promised to join her straight away, but now it was a quarter to eight, and on demand she would have to listen to an unconvincing-sounding Lynn as she served up the fairy tale that the group, enchanted by the Schröter Valley, had forgotten time and would be an hour or two late.
How could Lynn have known that without a satellite connection?
Okay, she didn’t know. Even in the morning, Julian had talked about an extended excursion into the hinterland of Snake Hill and predicted a late return. No cause for concern. Everything was bound to be fine.
Fine. Ha ha.
Nina stared dully ahead. Perhaps it was fine to fuck the guests around, but not her, thank you very much. She should never have got involved with the richest old codger in the world. It was as simple as that. High time to take an ice-cold shower and do a few lengths in the pool.
‘No, there’s something solemn about it,’ Ögi said. ‘Only if you transcend it, of course.’
‘If you what?’ Winter smiled.
‘If you reduce the immediately perceptible to its significance, my dear,’ Ögi explained. ‘The most difficult exercise these days. Some people call it religion.’
‘A tilted flag? An old landing module?’
‘An old landing module and the essentially rather unexciting leftovers of two men in a boring-looking area of the Moon – but they were the first men who ever set foot on it! Do you understand? It gives the whole of the Mare Tranquillitatis a – a—’
Ögi struggled for words.
‘Sacred dignity?’ Aileen Donoghue suggested, with gleaming eyes and a church-going tone.
‘Exactly!’
‘Aha,’ said Winter.
‘Do you have to believe in God to feel that?’ Rebecca Hsu fished a glacé cherry out of her drink, pursed her lips and sucked it into her mouth. A quiet slurp and it was gone. ‘I just found it significant, but sacred—’
‘Because you have no sacred tradition,’ Chucky said to her. ‘Your people, I mean. Your nation. The Chinese don’t hold with the sacred.’
‘Thanks for reminding me. At least now I know why I liked the Rupes Recta better.’
They had assembled for communicative relaxation exercises in the Mama Quilla Club, and were trying to quell their anxiety about the continued absence of the Ganymede by vociferously going through the day’s events. In the western Mare Tranquillitatis they had admired the landing console of the very first lunar module, in which Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the satellite in 1969. The area was considered a culturally protected area, along with three little craters, named after the pioneers and the third man, Collins, who had had to stay in the spaceship. Even during their approach, from a great height, the museum, as the region was generally known, had revealed the full banality of man’s arrival. Small and parasitic, like a fly on the hide of an elephant, the console stuck to the regolith, and Armstrong’s famous bootprint lay in splendour under a glass case. A place for pilgrims. Doubtless there were more magnificent cathedrals, and yet Ögi was right when he felt there was something in it that bestowed significance and greatness on the human race. It was the certainty that they wouldn’t have been able to stand there if those men hadn’t taken the journey through the airless wastes and performed the miracle of the first moon landing. So what they felt was respect, in the end. Later that afternoon, in the view of the infinite-looking wall of Rupes Recta, which looked as if the whole Moon continued on a level 200 metres higher up, they had succumbed to the sublimity of the cosmic architecture, deeply impressed, admittedly, but without feeling the curiously touching power emanated by the pitiful memorabilia of human presence in the Mare Tranquillitatis. At that moment most of them had understood that they were not pioneers. No one said hello to a pioneer. He was greeted not by shabby metal frames, not by bootprints, but only by loneliness, the unknown.