The climax peaked in a brief erasure of all thoughts, swept clean the convolutions of his brain and reinforced the certainty that old was still twenty years older than he was. For a moment he felt immersed in the pure, delicious moment. Nina snuggled up to him, and his suspicion immediately welled up again. As if sex were merely the pleasurable preamble to a stack of small print, a magnificent portal leading inevitably to the nursery, the most perfidious kind of ambush. He looked helplessly at the blonde shock of hair on his chest. Not that he wanted rid of her. He actually didn’t want her to go. It would have been enough for her simply to turn back into the astronaut whose job it was to entertain his guests without that moist promise in her eyes that she would never leave him, that henceforth she would always be there for him, for a whole lifetime! He ran his pointed fingers through the down on the back of her neck, embarrassed by his own reaction.
‘I ought to get back to the control room,’ he murmured.
His suggestion met with harsh, muted sounds.
‘Okay, in ten minutes,’ he agreed. ‘Shall we shower?’
In the bathroom the general luxury of the equipment continued. Tropically warm rain sprang from a generously curved shower-head, droplets so light that they floated down rather than falling. Hedegaard insisted on soaping him, and concentrated an excess of foam on a small if expanding area. His concern about her excessive demands made way for fresh arousal; the shower cabin was spacious and resplendent with all kinds of handy grips, Hedegaard pressed herself against him and he into her and – bang! – another thirty minutes had passed.
‘I’ve really got to go now,’ he said into his fluffy towel.
‘Will we meet up again later?’ she asked. ‘After dinner?’
He had towel in his eyes, towel in his ears. He didn’t hear her, or at least not loudly enough, and when he was about to ask what she’d said she was on the phone to Peter Black about something technical. He slipped quickly into jeans and T-shirt, kissed her quickly on the cheek and disappeared before she could end the call.
Seconds later he stepped into the control room and found Lynn in a hushed conversation with Dana Lawrence. Ashwini Anand was planning routes for the coming day on a three-dimensional map. Half the room was dominated by a holographic wall, whose windows showed the public areas of the hotel from the perspective of surveillance cameras. Only the suites were unobserved. In the pool, Heidrun, Finn and Miranda were having a diving competition, watched by Olympiada Rogacheva, whose husband was having a weight-lifting contest with Evelyn Chambers in the gym. The outside cameras showed Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker playing tennis, or at least Julian assumed that it was Marc and Mimi, while the golf-players on the far side of the gorge were just setting off for home.
‘Everything okay with you guys?’ he asked in a pointedly cheerful voice.
‘Great.’ Lynn smiled. Julian noticed that she looked somehow chalky, as if she were the only person in the room being illuminated by a different light source. ‘How was your trip?’
‘Argumentative. Mimi and Karla were discussing the copulative habits of higher beings. We need a telescope on Mons Blanc.’
‘So you can spy on them?’ Lawrence asked without a hint of amusement.
‘Hell no, just to get a better view of the hotel. God! I thought everyone would be so awestruck up here that they’d be falling into each other’s arms, and instead they’re banging on about the Holy Ghost.’ His eye wandered to the window that showed the station. ‘Has the train left again?’ he asked casually.
‘Which train?’
‘The Lunar Express. The LE-2, I mean, the one that came in last night. Has it set off again already?’
Dana stared at him as if he had thrown a pile of syllables at her feet and demanded that she cobble a sentence together.
‘The LE-2 hasn’t arrived.’
‘It hasn’t?’
Anand turned round and smiled. ‘No, that was the LE-1, the one you arrived on yesterday.’
‘I know. And where has it been? In the meantime?’
‘In the meantime?’
‘What are you actually talking about?’ Lynn asked.
‘Well, about—’ Julian hesitated. The screen really did show only one train. He felt a dark premonition creeping up on him, that it was the same Lunar Express that had brought them here. Which led to the reverse conclusion that—
‘A train did pull in this morning,’ he insisted defiantly.
His daughter and Dana exchanged a swift glance.
‘Which one?’ asked Dana, as if walking on glass.
‘That one there.’ Julian pointed impatiently at the screen.
Silence.
‘Certainly not,’ Anand tried again. ‘The LE-1 hasn’t left the station since it got here.’
‘But I’ve seen it.’
‘Julian—’ Lynn began.
‘When I was looking out of the window!’
‘Dad, you can’t have seen it!’
If she had told him she’d temporarily lent the train to a dozen aliens, he would have been less concerned. Only a few hours ago he would have put it all down to a hallucination. Not any more.
‘It’s one thing after another,’ he sighed. ‘Today I met Carl Hanna, okay? At half past five in the corridor, and then—’
‘I’m sorry, but what were you doing in the corridor at half past five?’
‘Neither here nor there! Earlier, anyway—’
Hanna? Exactly, Hanna! He would have to ask Hanna. Perhaps he had seen that ominous train. After all, he had been down there before him, exactly at the same time as—
Just a moment. Hanna had come towards him from the station.
‘No,’ he said to himself. ‘No, no.’
‘No?’ Lynn tilted her head on one side. ‘What do you mean, no?’
Mad! Completely absurd. Why would Hanna be taking secret joyrides on the Lunar Express?
‘Is it possible that you’ve been dreaming?’ she continued. ‘Hallucinating?’
‘I was wide awake.’
‘Fine, you were awake. To get back to the question of what you were doing at half past five—’
‘Simple insomnia! God almighty, I went for a walk.’
His eye scoured the monitor wall. Where was the Canadian? There, in the Mama Quilla Club. Slouching, sipping cocktails, on a sofa, with the Donoghues, Nairs and Locatellis.
‘Maybe Julian’s right,’ Dana Lawrence said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe we really did miss something.’
‘Nonsense, Dana, no way.’ Lynn shook her head. ‘We both know that no train left. Ashwini knows that too.’
‘Do we really know?’
‘Nothing was delivered, no one went anywhere.’
‘Easy to check.’ Dana walked to the monitor wall and opened a menu. ‘We just have to look at the recording.’
‘Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!’ Lynn was getting tense. ‘We don’t need to look at a recording.’
‘With the best will in the world, I can’t imagine why you’re so resistant to the idea,’ Julian said, amazed. ‘Let’s take a look at it. We should have done that straight away.’
‘Dad, we’ve got everything under control.’
‘As you wish,’ said Lawrence. ‘As a matter of fact it’s my job to keep everything here under control, isn’t it, Lynn? That’s why you employed me in the first place. I’m ultimately responsible for the security of your hotel and the wellbeing of your guests, and monorails that operate all by themselves are at odds with that.’
Lynn shrugged. Dana waited for a moment, then issued instructions with darting fingers. Another window opened, showed the interior of the station hall. The time-code said 27 May 2025, 05.00.
Should we go further back?’
‘No.’ Julian shook his head. ‘It was between five fifteen and five thirty.’
Dana nodded and ran quickly through the recording.
Nothing happened. The LE-1 didn’t leave the station, and the LE-2 didn’t pull in either. God in heaven, Juli
an thought, Lynn’s right. I’m hallucinating. He tried to catch her eye and she avoided his, visibly upset that he hadn’t simply believed her.
‘Hmm,’ he murmured. ‘Hmm, okay. Sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ Dana said seriously. ‘It was entirely possible.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Lynn snarled. When she looked at him at last, her pupils were flickering with fury. ‘Are you actually sure that you didn’t dream that stupid walk of yours? Maybe you weren’t in the corridor at all. Maybe you were just in bed.’
‘As I said, I’m sorry.’ Taken aback, he wondered why she was so furious with him. He’d just wanted to be doubly sure. ‘Let’s just forget it, I made a mistake.’
Instead of answering she stepped up to the monitor wall, tapped in a series of orders and opened another set of recordings. Dana watched, arms folded, while Ashwini Anand pretended she wasn’t even there. Julian recognised the underground corridor, 05.20.
‘That really isn’t necessary,’ he hissed.
‘It isn’t?’ Lynn raised her eyebrows. ‘Why not? You wanted to be doubly sure, after all.’
She launched the sequence before he could start protesting again. After a few seconds Carl Hanna appeared and climbed on one of the moving walkways. He approached the end of the corridor, looked through the window into the station concourse and disappeared into one of the gangways that led to the train, only to reappear, seconds later, and be carried back again. Almost simultaneously, Julian stepped out of the lift.
‘Congratulations,’ Lynn said frostily. ‘You were telling the truth.’
‘Lynn—’
She brushed the ash-blonde hair off her forehead and turned to face him. Behind the fury in her eyes he thought he recognised something else. Fear, Julian thought. My God, she’s frightened! Then, all of a sudden, his daughter smiled, and her smile seemed to erase her fury as completely as if she knew nothing in life but benevolence and forgiveness. With a swing of her hips she came over to him, gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek and boxed him in the ribs.
‘Let me know when a UFO lands,’ she grinned, and left headquarters.
Julian stared after her. ‘I will,’ he murmured.
And suddenly the ghostly thought came to him that his daughter was an actress.
* * *
And yet!
In an act of childish perseverance he went to the Mama Quilla Club, whose dance floor was mysteriously illuminated under the eternal light show of the starry sky. Michio Funaki was mixing cocktails behind the bar. When he saw him, Warren Locatelli shot to his feet and raised his glass to him, waving his other hand wildly.
‘Julian! That was the most brilliant day of any holiday I’ve ever had!’
‘Impressive, really.’ Aileen Donoghue laughed in her tinkling soprano. ‘Even if we’ve had to learn golf all over again.’
‘Golf, bullshit!’ Locatelli pressed Julian to his chest and pulled him over to the seated group. ‘Carl and I went charging around in those moon buggies, it was absolutely crazy! You’ve got to build a racetrack up here, a real fucking Le Mans de la Lune!’
‘And he didn’t even win,’ giggled Momoka Omura. ‘He almost flattened his buggy.’
‘More to the point, he nearly flattened me,’ said Rebecca Hsu, placing a single peanut between her lips. ‘Warren’s company is inspiring, particularly when you think about moon burials.’
‘We had a wonderful day,’ smiled Sushma Nair. ‘Do come and join us.’
‘Right away.’ Julian smiled. ‘Just for a little while. Carl, have you got a minute?’
‘Of course.’ Hanna swung his legs off his sofa.
‘Just don’t go missing on me,’ Locatelli laughed. Recently he and Hanna had been spending a lot of time together. One chatty, the other taciturn, somehow strange, but plainly a friendship was developing there. They went to the bar, where Julian ordered the most complicated cocktail on the menu, an Alpha Centauri.
‘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!
Juneau, Alaska, USA
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 sh
e 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.’