She turned her head. Next to her, Tim was staring into the darkness.
‘What’s wrong, my hero?’ she whispered. ‘Can’t you sleep?’
‘Did I wake you?’
‘No, I just woke up, that’s all.’ She crawled nearer to him and rested her head on his shoulder.
‘You were wonderful,’ he said softly.
‘No, you were wonderful. Is there something on your mind?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps Julian was right after all. Maybe I’m just seeing ghosts.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s good that you’re keeping an eye on things. It’s just that, if you continue to treat him like an enemy, he’ll act like one.’
‘I’m not treating him like an enemy.’
‘Well, you’re not exactly the world champion when it comes to diplomacy.’
‘No.’ He laughed softly. ‘I don’t know, Amber. For some reason I’ve just got a bad feeling.’
‘That’s just the zero gravity,’ she murmured, almost asleep again already. ‘What could go wrong?’
Tim was silent. She blinked, lifted her head and realised she’d been mistaken. You could still see a narrow blue-white crescent on the right-hand side. Everything was fine. The Earth was still in its place.
Go to sleep, my darling, she wanted to say, but the tiredness overcame her with such force that she could only think it. Before she dozed off, she was overcome by the image of a black cloth spreading out over the two of them. Then, nothing.
Carl Hanna couldn’t sleep, but then again he didn’t need to. He ran his possessions through his fingers one after another, looking at them searchingly, rotating them, turning them over then packing them carefully away again: the small flacon of aftershave, the bottle filled with shower gel and the one with shampoo, tubes of skin cream, shaving foam, various packages of medication for headaches, sickness, stomach upsets, cotton buds and soft, pliable earplugs, toothbrush and toothpaste. He had even packed dental floss, nail scissors and a file, a hand mirror, his electric hair trimmer and three golf balls. There was a course in the grounds of the Gaia, Lynn had told him, Shepard’s Green. Hanna played golf reasonably well, and he also placed a lot of importance on looking well groomed. Apart from that, none of all this junk was what it seemed to be. Just as the guitar wasn’t really a guitar, Carl Hanna wasn’t the person he pretended to be. It wasn’t his real name, nor was his life story anything but complete fabrication.
He thought about Vic Thorn.
They had taken everything into account, everything except the possibility that Thorn might have an accident. The preparation for his mission had been exemplary, everything planned well in advance. Nothing should have gone wrong, but then a tiny speck of space debris had changed everything in a matter of seconds.
Hanna looked out into space.
Thorn was somewhere out there. He had joined the inventory of the cosmos, an asteroid on an unknown path. Many people believed that he must have stayed in the Earth’s gravitational field, which would have meant encountering his body cyclically in orbit. But Thorn had still not been found. It was possible that he would crash into the Sun one day in the far future. Plausible that some day in a few million years’ time he would turn up in the sphere of a planet inhabited by non-human intelligence and cause a great deal of surprise there.
He held up a roll-on deodorant, pulled off the cap, then put it back on and tucked it away.
This time, it would work.
26 May 2025
THE MISSION
Xintiandi, Shanghai, China
Chen Hongbing bent forward as he entered the room, in that way typical of people whose height is in constant conflict with doorframes and low-hanging ceiling-lights. He was actually extraordinarily tall for a Chinese man. On the other hand, the architect who designed the shikumen could hardly be accused of a lack of consideration for extravagant bodily proportions. The door was a good three metres high, so it hardly required him to hunch his shoulders as he did, or stretch out his chin which, as it approached his breastbone, seemed to linger hesitantly. Despite his size, Chen seemed gaunt and subservient. His gaze had a furtive nature about it, as if he were expecting to be beaten, or worse. Jericho got the impression he had spent his whole life conversing with people who towered over him while he stayed seated.
If indeed this was Chen Hongbing.
The visitor touched the doorframe fleetingly with the tips of his fingers, as if wanting to assure himself of something solid to grasp in case of a sudden collapse. Confused, he looked at the pile of removal boxes, then crossed the threshold with the caution of a tightrope walker. The white midday sun stretched across the room, a sculpture of light, broken into a billion pieces by the whirling dust. In that pale light Chen looked like a ghost narrowing his eyes. He looked younger than Tu Tian had said he was. His skin stretched tautly over his cheekbones, forehead and chin; a face which was deeply carved with lines. Around his eyes, though, a fine macramé pattern branched out, more like cracks than lines. To Jericho, they looked like testimonies to a difficult life.
‘Ta chi le hen duo Ku,’ Tu Tian had said. ‘Hongbing has eaten bitterness, Owen, for many long years. Every morning it comes up, he forces it down again, and one day he will choke on it. Help him, xiongdi.’
Eaten bitterness. Even misery was available for consumption in China.
Jericho looked indecisively at the box in his hands and wondered if he should heave it onto the desk as planned or back onto the pile. Chen’s arrival was ill-timed. He hadn’t expected the man to come this early. Tu Tian had said something about an afternoon visit, and it wasn’t even twelve yet. His stomach was rumbling, and his brow and upper lip glistened with sweat. The more he ran his hands over his face and hair to mix the dust and sweat, the less he looked like someone who was about to move into the expensive, trendy neighbourhood of Xintiandi. Three days without shaving had taken their toll. Encased in a sticky cloth of a T-shirt, which showed the 37 degrees Celsius and what felt like 99.9 per cent air humidity much more than the colour it had once possessed, and having hardly eaten for twenty-four hours, Jericho wanted nothing more than to put the move behind him as quickly as possible. Just one more box, then off to a food stall in Taicang Lu, carry on unpacking, shower, shave.
That had been the plan.
But when he saw Chen standing there in the dusty light, he knew he couldn’t put his visitor off until later. Chen was the kind of person who would stay in your mind if you sent him away, and besides, out of respect to Tu Tian it was completely out of the question. He put the box back on the pile and put on a B-grade smile: warm, but noncommittal.
‘Chen Hongbing, I take it.’
The man standing opposite him nodded and looked bewilderedly at the boxes and piled-up pieces of furniture. He coughed slightly, then took a small step back.
‘I’ve come at a bad time.’
‘Not at all.’
‘It just so happened that I – I was nearby, but if it puts you out I can come back—’
‘It’s no trouble at all.’ Jericho looked around, pulled over a chair and put it in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat, honourable Chen, make yourself at home. I’m just moving in, hence the chaos. Can I get you anything?’
You can’t, he thought, you would have needed to go shopping for that, but you’re a man. When women move house, they make sure they have a full fridge before the first box even leaves the removal van, and if there isn’t a fridge, they buy one and plug it in. Then he remembered the half-full bottle of orange juice. It had been on the lounge windowsill since yesterday morning, which meant it had led a two-day-long existence in the glaring sun and intelligent life might even have developed inside it.