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It was only when he was on the way to the suite that it occurred to him that there might be another reason why Sophie found nothing but manipulated videos:

She herself had recut the material.

* * *

Mukesh Nair pulled himself snorting out of the crater pool. A little further off Sushma was towelling herself dry, in conversation with Eva Borelius and Karla Kramp, while Heidrun Ögi and Finn O’Keefe played childish competitions, to see who could stay underwater longest. The Earth shone in through the panoramic window, like a reliable old friend. Nair picked a towel off the pile and rubbed the water out of his hair.

‘Do you feel like this?’ he said. ‘When I see our home, it’s curious: it looks entirely unimpressed.’

‘Unimpressed by what?’ asked Karla, and disappeared into her dressing gown.

‘By us.’ Mukesh Nair lowered the towel and looked up to the sky. ‘By the consequences of our actions. It’s got hotter everywhere. Previously inhabited areas are underwater, others are turning into deserts. Whole tribes of people are on the move, hungry, thirsty, unemployed, homeless, we’re seeing the biggest migrations in centuries, but there’s no sign of it at all. Not from this distance.’

‘Looking at the old lady from this distance, you wouldn’t know if we were bombing each other flat,’ said Karla. ‘Means nothing.’

Nair shook his head, fascinated.

‘The deserts must have got bigger, don’t you think? Whole coastlines have changed. But if you’re far enough away – it doesn’t change her beauty in the slightest.’

‘If you’re far enough away,’ Sushma smiled, ‘even I’m beautiful.’

‘Oh, Sushma!’ Her husband tilted his head and laughed, showing perfectly restored teeth. ‘You will always be the most beautiful woman in the world to me, near or far. You’re my most beautiful vegetable of all!’

‘There’s a compliment,’ said Heidrun to Finn, water in one ear, Nair’s flattering baritone in the other. ‘Why do I never get to hear things like that?’

‘Because I’m not Walo.’

‘Lousy explanation.’

‘Comparing people to foodstuffs is his department.’

‘Is it just me, or have you stopped making much of an effort lately?’

‘Vegetables don’t spring to mind when I look at you. Asparagus, perhaps.’

‘Finn, I really have to say, that’s going to get you nowhere.’ She hurried to the edge of the pool, straightened and sent a great spray of water in Nair’s direction. ‘Hey! What are you talking about?’

‘The beauty of the Earth,’ smiled Sushma Nair. ‘And a bit about the beauty of women.’

‘Same thing,’ said Heidrun. ‘The Earth is female.’

Eva tied the belt of her kimono. ‘You see beauty out there?’

‘Of course.’ Nair nodded enthusiastically. ‘Beauty and simplicity.’

‘Shall I tell you what I see?’ Eva Borelius said after thinking for a moment. ‘A misunderstanding.’

‘How so?’

‘Complete disproportion. The Earth out there has nothing to do with our familiar perception of it.’

‘That’s true,’ said Heidrun. ‘For example, Switzerland normally seems the size of Africa to a Swiss person. On the other hand, in the emotional reality of a Swiss person, Africa shrinks to a hot, damp island full of poor people, mosquitoes, snakes and diseases.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about.’ Eva nodded. ‘I see a beautiful planet, but not one that we share. A world which, in terms of what some have and others don’t, should look completely different.’

‘Bravo.’ Finn O’Keefe bobbed over and applauded.

‘Enough, Finn,’ hissed Heidrun. ‘Do you even know what we’re talking about?’

‘Of course,’ he yawned. ‘About how Eva Borelius had to fly to the Moon to discover the bleedin’ obvious.’

‘No.’ Eva laughed drily and started picking up her swimming things. ‘I’ve always known what the planet looks like, Finn, but it’s still different seeing it like this. It reminds me who we’re actually researching for.’

‘You’re researching for the guy who’s paying you. Have you only just realised?’

‘That free research is going down the toilet? No.’

‘Not that you personally have any reason to complain,’ Karla joined in maliciously.

‘Hey, hang on.’ Eva, caught in a pincer movement, raised her eyebrows. ‘Am I complaining?’

Karla looked innocently back. ‘I just wanted to say.’

‘Of course, stem cell research brings in money, so she gets some too. It cost a lot of money to take the isolation and investigation of adult cells and develop it into the production of artificial tissue. Now we’ve decoded the protein blueprints of our body cells, we work successfully with molecular prosthetics, we have replacements for destroyed nerves and burnt skin, we can produce new cardiac muscle cells, we can cure cancer, because not even the wealthiest people in the world are spared heart attacks, cancer and burn injuries.’ She paused. ‘But they are spared malaria. And cholera. Those are diseases for poor people. If we were to
apportion budgets purely on the quantitative occurrence of such diseases, the greatest amount of research money would flow to the Third World. Instead, the majority of all malaria patents, even the most promising, are put on ice, because you can’t earn any money with them.’

Nair went on looking at the far-away Earth, still smiling, but more thoughtfully.

‘I come from an unimaginably big country,’ he said. ‘And at the same time from a graspable cosmos. I’ve never had the impression that there’s just one world, not least because we see it from all perspectives at the same time. No one sees it as a whole, no one sees the whole truth. But if we see the world as a multiplicity of small, interlocking worlds, each determined by its own rules, you can try to improve some of them. And that helps you to understand the whole. If my job had been to improve
the
world, I would definitely have failed.’

‘So what have you improved?’ asked Karla.

‘A few of those little worlds.’ He beamed at them. ‘At least I hope so.’

‘You’ve carpeted India with air-conditioned shopping centres, connected whole villages to the internet, provided God knows how many thousands of Indian farmers with a basic living. But haven’t you also opened the door to multinational companies, by offering them the chance to get involved?’

‘Of course.’

‘And haven’t some of them gratefully taken up your model, rented Indian land and replaced the farmers with machines and cheap labourers?’

Nair’s smile froze on his face. ‘Any idea can be corrupted.’

‘I’d just like to understand.’

‘Certainly, such things happen. We can’t allow that.’

‘Look, I don’t entirely agree with your romanticisation of inequality. Small, autonomous worlds. You do a lot of good things, Mukesh, but you’re globalisation personified. Which I think is fine, as long as the tiny little worlds aren’t swallowed up by the big companies—’

‘Shouldn’t we be getting back to our rooms?’ said Eva.

‘Yes, of course.’ Karla shrugged. ‘Let’s go. Typical of you, always going on about how annoyed you are, and then getting all ashamed when I mention some concrete examples.’

‘Where have the others got to, by the way?’ Sushma shook her head uneasily. ‘They should have been back ages ago.’

‘When we came down here they were still on their way.’

‘And they still are, by the look of it,’ said Nair. Then he rested a friendly hand on Karla’s shoulder. ‘And you’re completely right, Karla. We should talk about this kind of thing more often. And not spare each other’s feelings.’

‘Shall I tell you how I see it?’ asked Finn.

They all looked at him.

‘I see two dozen of the richest people on this much-discussed planet Earth feeling trapped between malaria and champagne and, in line with the disproportion that you mentioned, Eva, escaping to the Moon, where they reach remarkable insights in the most expensive hotel in the solar system. You know what? I’m going for another couple of lengths.’

* * *

Sophie had installed Tim’s program and asked him casually whether it hadn’t occurred to him that she might be the traitor. He had looked baffled for a moment, before exploding with laughter.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘You bet.’

‘Well—’

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Happy now?’

He laughed again. ‘If people got out of jail by saying that, we could convert our prisons into hen houses.’

‘You’re a teacher, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many times do you hear that every day?’

‘What? “It’s not me, it wasn’t me”?’ He shrugged. ‘No idea. I usually lose track at about midday. But okay, it wasn’t you. Do you suspect anybody?’

She lowered her head over the keyboard, so that her blonde curls hid her facial expression.

‘Not directly.’

‘You’re thinking about my sister, aren’t you?’ He sighed. ‘Come on, Sophie, it’s not a problem, I’m not cross with you. You’re not the only person who feels that way. Dana has completely homed in on Lynn.’

‘I know.’ Sophie looked up. ‘But I don’t believe for a second that your sister has anything to do with it. Lynn built this hotel. It would be completely idiotic. And what’s more, it’s only just now occurred to me, but when she refused to let your father see the corridor video – why would she have done that? I mean, why, if she had actually recut it herself? In her place I’d have proudly rubbed his nose in it.’

Tim looked grateful and curiously glum at the same time. It was immediately clear to her that he was more inclined towards Dana’s opinion than her own, and that he was bothered by the fact.

‘Quite honestly,’ she smiled shyly, ‘I was wondering before whether you yourself mightn’t—’

‘Ah!’ he grinned. ‘No, it wasn’t me.’

‘More hen houses.’ She smiled back. ‘Would you like to keep me company while I reconstruct the records?’

‘No, I’d just like to see where Lynn’s got to. But call me if you think of anything.’ He smiled. ‘You’re very brave, Sophie. Will you manage?’

‘Somehow.’

‘Not a bit scared?’

She shrugged. ‘Oddly, the thing I’m least worried about is the idea of being blown up. It’s too unreal. If it does happen, we’ll all go in a flash, but we’re not going to know all that much about it.’

‘I feel the same.’

‘So what are
you
afraid of?’

‘Right now? I’m worried about Amber. Very worried. About my wife, about my father—’

‘About your sister—’

‘Yes. About Lynn too. See you later, Sophie.’

* * *

‘That wasn’t nice,’ Heidrun mocked, after the others had fled the pool area. Only she and Finn were still drifting in the black water of the crater, somewhere between idyll and apocalypse.

‘But true,’ said Finn, launching into a crawl away from her.

She pushed her wet hair behind her ears. Below the surface of the water her body was compressed into a bony caricature of itself, as if the waves were starting to dissolve her. Finn cut a swathe through the water like a motorboat, sending watery chaos in all directions, great surges that a swimmer could never have produced in terrestrial waters. An amusement factor reserved only for moon travellers. You could catapult yourself out of the water like a dolphin and, when you splashed back in again, set small tsunamis on their way. You were operating in arrogant opposition to the laws of gravity, but Finn’s mood was closer to the grey of the surrounding landscape. Heidrun stretched, dived, slipped after him and past him and burst through the surface. Finn saw that the way to the opposite edge of the crater was blocked, and balanced himself in the water.

‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Bad mood?’

‘No idea.’ He shrugged. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be going up?’

‘And what about you?’

‘I haven’t made any dates with anybody.’

Heidrun thought for a moment. Had she made any dates? With Walo, of course, but could you really describe the day-to-day magnetism of marriage as a date?

‘So you’ve no idea what your mood is.’

‘I don’t know.’

It was true, she guessed, Finn probably just had no idea why his mood had so suddenly soured. He had been in great form all day, making her laugh with his laconic sarcasm, a gift that Heidrun valued above all others. She liked men whose wit sprang from easy understatement, which gave them the ultimate accolade of cool. In her opinion there was hardly anything more erotic than laughter, sadly an attitude fraught with difficulties, because the majority of the male sex tended to try to produce it intellectually. The result was usually tiresome and discouraging. In their constant bid to score points with hilarious thigh-slappers, these suitors lost what remained of their natural machismo, and there was much worse to come. For her part, Heidrun derived intense and noisy pleasure from sex, and had ended up in paroxysms of laughter during so many orgasms that the gentlemen in question, convinced that they were the object of her laughter, were thrown spontaneously off their stroke. The drop in pleasure pressure was always followed by the same embarrassment, she always felt guilty, but what was she supposed to do? She loved laughing. Ögi was the first to understand. Heidrun’s natural responses neither inhibited his erections nor slowed him down in any way. Walo Ögi with his chiselled Zürich physiognomy, which could break out into ringing laughter at any time, took sex no more seriously than she did, with the result that they both enjoyed it a great deal.

Finn, on the other hand. Viewed objectively, in so far as the objectification of beauty was ever justified, he was far better looking than Walo, in terms of classical proportion at any rate: he was perfectly built and a good sixteen years younger. Apart from that, he had the appearance of an uncommunicative and sometimes sulky melancholic. He concealed his stroppiness behind insecurity, his shyness behind indifference, but he was enough of an actor to flirt professionally with all of these qualities. As a result he was surrounded by the aura of mystery that turned millions of emancipated female individuals into spineless mush. Supposedly shy, he cultivated the pose of the eternal outsider in a world whose cofounder and original inhabitant he was; he acted the part of the lout, as if Marlon Brando, James Dean and Johnny Depp hadn’t already taken the idea to ludicrous extremes, and exuded a sweaty rebellious appeal. He couldn’t, with the best will in the world, ever have been described as the life and soul. And yet behind the forbidding façade Heidrun sensed an inclination to excess, to anarchic fun, to wild parties, as long as the right people were invited. She had no doubt that one could fool about with him, and have laughing sex until libido and diaphragm both gave in, after hours.