The get-up gives a hint of what’s to come. First everyone is dressed in silver and orange overalls, the colours of Orley Enterprises, then the whole group heads up to the gallery from which the walkways descend to the lifts. Next they make the acquaintance of a powerfully built black man, whom Julian introduces as Peter Black.
‘Easy to remember,’ Black says cheerfully, and shakes everyone’s hand. ‘But just call me Peter.’
‘Peter’s one of our two pilots and expedition leaders,’ Julian explains. ‘He and Nina – ah, here she is!’
A blonde woman with a short haircut and a freckled snub nose climbs out of the lift hatch and joins them. Julian puts an arm around her muscular shoulders. Evelyn screws up her eyes and bets that Nina turns up in Julian’s bedroom from time to time.
‘May I introduce you: Nina Hedegaard from Denmark.’
‘Hey!’ Nina waves to everybody.
‘Same role as Peter: pilot, expedition leader. They will both be by your side over the next two weeks, whenever you’re travelling vast distances. They will show you the most beautiful parts of our satellite, and protect you from weird space creatures such as the Chinese. Apologies, Rebecca – the red Chinese of course!’
With a start, Rebecca Hsu looks up from the display of her phone.
‘I have no network,’ she says pleadingly.
It’s cramped inside the lift cabin. You have to climb. Six rows of five seats are arranged vertically, connected by a ladder. The luggage has been stowed in the other lift. Evelyn Chambers sits in the same row as Miranda Winter, Finn O’Keefe and the Rogachevs. She leans back and stretches her legs. In terms of comfort, the seats are easily a match for first class in any airline.
‘Ooohh, how nice,’ Miranda says, delighted. ‘A Dane.’
‘You like Denmark?’ Rogachev asks with cool politeness, while Olympiada stares straight ahead.
‘Excuse me!’ Miranda opens her eyes wide. ‘I am a Dane.’
‘You must forgive my ignorance, I work in the steel sector.’ Rogachev’s mouth curls into a smile. ‘Are you an actress?’
‘Hmm. Opinions vary on that one.’ Miranda gives a loud, dirty laugh. ‘What am I, Evelyn?’
‘The entertainment factor?’ Evelyn suggests.
‘Well, okay, I’m actually a model. So I’ve done pretty much everything. Of course I wasn’t always a model, I used to be a salesgirl at the cheese counter, then I was responsible for the fries at McDonald’s, but then I was discovered on this kind of casting show? And then Levi’s took me on straight away. I caused car accidents! I mean, six foot tall, young, pretty, and boobs, genuine boobs, you understand, the real thing – Hollywood was bound to give me a call sooner or later.’
O’Keefe, slouching in his seat, raises an eyebrow. Olympiada Rogacheva seems to have worked out that you can’t deny reality just by looking away.
‘So what kinds of parts have you played?’ she asks flatly.
‘Oh, I had my breakthrough with Criminal Passion, an erotic thriller.’ Miranda gives a sugary smile. ‘I even got a prize, but let’s not go into that.’
‘Why? That’s very— that’s great.’
‘Not really – they gave me the Golden Raspberry for the worst performance.’ Miranda laughs and throws her hands in the air. ‘But hey! Then came comedies, but I didn’t have much luck with that. No hits, so I just started drinking. Bad stuff! For a while I looked like a Danish pastry with raisins for eyes, until one night there I am careening along Mulholland Drive and I go over this homeless guy, my God, poor man!’
‘Terrible.’
‘Yeah, but actually not because, between ourselves, he survived and made a lot of money out of it. Not that I’m trying to whitewash anything! But I swear, that’s what happened, and I had my whole stay in jail filmed from the very first second to the last, they were even able to get into the shower. Prison on prime time! And I was back on top again.’ She sighs. ‘Then I met Louis Burger. Do you know him?’
‘No, I—’
‘Oh, right. You’re from the steel sector, or your husband is, where you don’t know people like that. Although Louis Burger, industrialist, investment magnate—’
‘Really not—’
‘No, I’m sure I do,’ Rogachev says thoughtfully. ‘Wasn’t there a swimming accident?’
‘That’s right. Our happiness lasted only two years.’ Miranda stares straight ahead. Suddenly she sniffs and rubs something from the corner of her eye. ‘It happened off the coast of Miami. Heart attack, when swimming, and now can you imagine what his children have done, the revolting brats? Not ours, we didn’t have any, the ones from Louis’s previous marriage. They only go and sue me! Me, his wife? They’re saying I contributed to his death, can you believe it?’
‘And did you?’ O’Keefe asks innocently.
‘Idiot!’ For a moment Miranda looks deeply hurt. ‘Everybody knows I was acquitted. What can I do about it if he leaves me thirteen billion? I could never harm anyone, I couldn’t hurt a fly! You know what?’ She looks Olympiada deep in the eyes. ‘As a matter of fact I can’t do anything at all. But I do it really well! Hahaha! And you?’
‘Me?’ Olympiada looks as if she’s been ambushed.
‘Yes. What do you do?’
‘I—’ She looks pleadingly at Oleg. ‘We’re—’
‘My wife is a member of the Russian Parliament,’ says Rogachev without looking at her. ‘She’s the daughter of Maxim Ginsburg.’
‘Hey! Oh, my God! Wooaahh! Ginsburg, wooooww!’ Miranda claps her hands, winks conspiratorially at Olympiada, thinks for a moment and asks greedily: ‘And who’s that?’
‘The Russian president,’ Rogachev explains. ‘Until last year at least. The new one’s called Mikhail Manin.’
‘Oh, yeah. Hasn’t he done it before?’
‘He hasn’t, in fact.’ Rogachev smiles. ‘Maybe you mean Putin.’
‘No, no, it’s longer ago, something with an “a” and “in” at the end.’ Miranda trawls through the nursery of her education. ‘Nope, it’s not coming.’
‘Maybe you mean Stalin?’ O’Keefe asks slyly.
The PA system puts an end to all their speculation. A soft, dark woman’s voice issues safety instructions. Almost everything she says sounds to Evelyn like a perfectly normal aeroplane safety routine. They fasten their belts, like horse harnesses. In front of each row of seats, monitors light up and transmit vivid camera pictures of the outside world, giving the illusion that you’re looking through windowpanes. They see the inside of the cylinder, increasingly illuminated by the rising sun. The hatch closes, life-support systems spring to life with a hum, then the seats tip backwards so that they’re all lying as if they’re at the dentist’s.
‘Tell me, Miranda,’ whispers O’Keefe, turning his head towards Miranda. ‘Do you still have names for them?’
‘Who?’ she asks back, just as quietly. ‘Oh, right. Of course.’ Her hands become display units. ‘This one’s Huey. That other one’s Dewey.’
‘What about Louie?’
She looks at him from under lowered eyelids.
‘For Louie we’ll have to get to know each other better.’
At that moment a jolt runs through the cabin, a tremor and a vibration. O’Keefe slips lower in his seat. Evelyn holds her breath. Rogachev’s face is blank. Olympiada has her eyes shut. Somewhere someone laughs nervously.
What happens next is nothing, but nothing, like the launch of a plane.
The lift accelerates so quickly that Evelyn feels momentarily as if she has merged with her seat. She is pressed into the plump upholstery until arms and armrests seem to have become one. The vehicle shoots vertically out of the cylinder. Below them, from the perspective of a second camera, the Isla de las Estrellas shrinks to a long, dark scrap with a turquoise dot inside it, the pool. Was it really only yesterday that she was lying down there, critically eyeing her belly, bewailing the extra four kilos that had recently driven her from bikini to one-piece, while everyone around her was constantly insisting that her weight increase suited her and stressed her femininity? Forget the four kilos, she thinks. Now she could swear she weighs tonnes. She feels so heavy that she’s afraid she might at any moment crash through the floor of the lift and plop down in the sea, causing a medium-sized tsunami.