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‘Amber.’ Tim crouched down. ‘He didn’t care. When we—’

‘Care about what?’ she interrupted him. ‘Maybe he wasn’t there for you very often. As I see it, he cares day in, day out, for a weird cosmic phenomenon called humanity, which does all kinds of terrible, stupid things. Sorry, Tim, but I can’t stand the peevish way young people talk about their parents, even if they produce miracles, all that in-an-ideal-world claptrap – I don’t buy it, I’m afraid.’

‘It isn’t just that he wasn’t around,’ Tim defended himself, ‘but that on the few occasions when he should have been there, he wasn’t! That Crystal lost her m—’

‘You’re completely unfair, you little shit,’ Julian snorted. ‘Your mother had a genetic predisposition.’

‘Crap!’

‘She did!
Capito, hombre?
She’d have lost her mind even if I’d been there for her every hour of every day.’

‘You know very well that—’

‘No, she was sick! It was in her genes, and before I married her she’d fried half of her brain on coke anyway. And where Lynn’s concerned—’

‘Where Lynn’s concerned, you listen to me,’ Amber interrupted. ‘Because as a matter of fact, and Tim’s completely right here, you can’t look into anyone else’s head. You think life’s a film and you’re directing it, and everyone acts and thinks according to the script. I don’t know whether you really love Lynn, or only the part that she’s supposed to play for you—’

‘Of course I love her!’

‘Okay, you’ve done everything for her, you’ve made sure she had the best possible career, but have you ever been
interested
in her? Are you sure you’ve ever really been interested in anyone?’

‘Christ alive, why have I organised all this, in that case?’

‘No, no.’ She raised a finger. ‘Listen, little Julian, to what your aunt says! You make films and you cast people in them. With ten billion extras and Lynn in the main part.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘Yes, it is. You can’t see that your daughter is manic-depressive, and that she threatens to suffer the same fate as her mother.’

‘Exactly,’ cried Tim. ‘Because you—’

‘Shut it, Tim! Look, Julian, it’s not that you don’t want to see it, you just
don’t
see
it! Come down to earth. Lynn’s unusually talented, she has brilliant qualities, just like you do, but unlike you she hasn’t got power flowing through her veins, she’s not a natural mover and shaker, and she doesn’t have a buffalo hide. So stop selling her as perfect and beating up on her because she’ll never dare to contradict you. Ease off on the pressure. Say after me: Lynn – is – not – like – me!’

‘Erm – Julian?’

Amber looked up. Nina Hedegaard, visibly troubled, was hovering in the airlock leading to the habitation units. Julian turned his head and forced himself to assume a relaxed expression.

‘Come in, come in. We were just swapping funny family stories and discussing our next Christmas party.’

‘I don’t mean to bother you.’ She smiled shyly. ‘Hello, Amber. Hi, Tim.’

Since the Charon had set off on its long trip back to the OSS, Julian had stopped trying to hide his relationship with the pilot. Amber liked Nina and felt sorry for her, particularly for the way she believed Julian when he hinted at their future together.

‘What’s up?’ asked Julian.

‘I’ve got Jennifer Shaw on the line.’

‘I’ll be right there.’ He strolled to the airlock, all too willingly, it seemed to Amber.

‘And then you come right back,’ she added. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Julian. ‘I was afraid of that.’

Tim opened his mouth to make a disagreeable remark. Amber flashed a glance at him that made him think better of it.

* * *

Lynn was sharpening the blade of her suspicions.

What had happened on the Moon seemed like a single, painful dream sequence, and in fact she had difficulty remembering the last few hours in Gaia. But when Dana Lawrence floated past in her sleeping bag at the same moment as she opened her eyes, cast her a glance and asked her how she was, a synaptic firework exploded in her brain, and she couldn’t help it. She said:

‘Piss off to hell, you two-faced snake.’

Dana paused, with her head thrown back, her eyelids heavy with arrogance. The voices of the others could be heard from the next sector along. Then she came closer.

‘What’s your problem with me, Lynn? I haven’t done anything to you.’

‘You’ve questioned my authority.’

‘No, I was loyal. Do you think it was fun watching Kokoschka burn, even if he was in cahoots with Hanna? I had to order the evacuation.’

The stupid thing was that she was right. By now Lynn knew that she had behaved in an extremely paranoid way, even though she wondered in what context it might
have been. For example she hadn’t understood why she hadn’t wanted to show Julian certain films. And she couldn’t remember her wild escape across the glass bridges, seconds before the fire had broken out, but she could remember Hanna’s betrayal, the bomb and the operation to rescue the people trapped in Gaia’s head. For a moment she had regained her leadership qualities, before her mind had given in once and for all. That it was now working again seemed at first like a miracle, although she wasn’t particularly pleased, since the generator of her emotions had clearly suffered some damage. Listless and depressed, she couldn’t even remember what it was like to feel joy. On the other hand she knew what she definitely
hadn’t
dreamed about in all that confusion. It was clearly in front of her eyes, it echoed in her ears, a matter in which Lawrence played an inglorious part.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said.

‘I did my job, Lynn,’ Dana said, insulted. ‘If shortcomings in the planning and construction of Gaia led to disaster, you can’t blame me.’

‘There were no shortcomings. When will we actually get there?’

‘In about three hours.’.

Lynn started unbuckling herself. She was thirsty. And for something specific, grapefruit juice. So she wasn’t just thirsty, she’d got an appetite. An emotional reaction, almost.

‘They should have put in more emergency exits,’ Dana Lawrence said, trickling acid into the wounds. ‘The throat was a bottleneck.’

‘Didn’t I sack you?’

‘You did.’

‘Then shut up.’

Lynn pushed Lawrence aside and slipped over to the hatch leading to the next area. As always, everyone would be very nice and caring, Embarrassing, embarrassing, it should have been her task to ask Julian’s guests what they would like. But she was ill. Gradually, in manageable portions, Tim had told her the full extent of the disaster, so by now she knew who had died and under what circumstances. And again she had struggled to feel anything, grief, or at the very least rage, and had come up with nothing but dull despair.

* * *

‘What did she want?’

‘What?’ Julian took off his headphones.

‘I said, what did she want?’

Tim tried not to sound unfriendly. Julian turned his head. The command panel of the Charon was in the back part of the sleeping area. Through the open bulkhead they could see into the adjacent lounge, where Heidrun, Sushma and Olympiada
were in conversation with Finn O’Keefe, while Walo Ögi was despairing over one of Karla Kramp’s castling manoeuvres.

‘Something really strange,’ Julian said quietly. ‘She was asking how many bombs we found at the moon base.’

‘How
many
?’

‘Apparently there were
two
mini-nukes aboard that rocket from Equatorial Guinea. There’s another one of those things up there.’

He said it in such a calm and matter-of-fact way that it took Tim a moment to understand the full import of the news.

‘Shit,’ he whispered. ‘Does Palmer know about this?’

‘They informed him straight away. Panic must have broken out at the base. They want to inspect the caves again.’

‘You mean, in case a bomb is found—’

‘Hanna may have hidden a second one.’

‘Pah.’

‘Mm-hm.’ Julian rested a hand on Tim’s shoulder. ‘Whatever, we don’t want to tell the world about it.’

‘I don’t know, Julian.’ Tim frowned. ‘Do you seriously think he put the second bomb in the caves as well?’

‘You don’t?’

‘When there was already one in there? I’d find a different place for a second one.’

‘That’s true too.’ Julian rubbed his beard. ‘And what if the second mini-nuke isn’t meant for the base?’

‘Who else would it be meant for?’

‘I’ve just got this idea. A bit crude, perhaps. But just imagine that someone’s trying to stir the Chinese and Americans up against each other. Not hard, given that they mixed it up last year. So what if the second bomb—’

‘Was meant for the Chinese?’ Tim slowly exhaled. ‘You should write novels. But okay. There’s a third possibility.’

‘Which is?’

‘The mining zone.’

‘Yeah.’ Julian gnawed on his lower lip. ‘And there’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘But how about I tell Amber?’

‘Okay, but no one else. I’ll have a talk to Jennifer and tell her what we think.’

They approached the space station at an angle, so that the massive 280-metre mushroom-shaped structure hung at a diagonal. By now they were all wearing their spacesuits again. Even though the Earth was still 36,000 kilometres away, seeing the OSS getting bigger on the screens was a bit like coming home: its five tori, the wide circle of its wharf, the extravagant modules of the Kirk and the Picard, the ring-shaped space harbour with its mobile airlocks, manipulators, freight shuttles and phalanxes of stumpy-winged evacuation pods. At 23.45 a hollow chime rang through the spaceship, along with a faint vibration as Hedegaard docked on the ring.

‘Please keep your suits on,’ said Nina. ‘The full kit. Your luggage—’

She fell silent. She had clearly realised that no one had any luggage. It had all been left in Gaia.

‘From the Charon we go straight to the Picard, where a snack bar has already been set up. We haven’t got much time – the lift will be there at about a quarter past twelve, and will leave the OSS straight away. We thought it – ahem, in your interest to get back to Earth as quickly as possible. You can store your helmets and backpacks in Torus-2.’

No one said anything. Gloomily they left the spaceship by the airlock, said farewell to their cramped flying hotel and, in a sense, belatedly to the Moon, which couldn’t in the end do anything about what had happened. They floated one after the other down the corridor to Torus-2, the distributor ring that accommodated the lobby and hotel reception. From there, connecting tunnels branched out, leading down to the suites and up through the levels to the part of the station used by the research teams with its labs, observatories and workshops. The two extendable airlocks on the inside of the torus which led to lift cabins were locked. Three astronauts were working on the consoles, checking the lift systems, overseeing the unloading of a freighter and repair work on a manipulator.

O’Keefe thought of the disc of the wharf, where spaceships were being built for bolder missions, of machines dashing through the silence of the universe and solar panels sparkling in the cold, white sun. Heidrun had pushed him out of the airlock up there, she had made fun of him, and Warren Locatelli had puked in his helmet.

How long ago was that? A decade? A century?

He wouldn’t be coming back, he knew that, as he set his helmet down on its
shelf. Making brash science-fiction films, saving the universe, any time! Whatever the script called for. But no going back.

‘No,’ he said to himself.

‘No?’

Heidrun set her helmet down next to his. He turned his head and looked into her violet eyes. He studied her elfin face, saw her hair forming a flowing white fan in zero gravity. Felt his heart like a lump in his chest.

‘Would you come back?’ he asked. ‘Here? To the Moon?’

She thought for a moment.

‘Yes. I think I would.’

‘So you found something up here.’

‘A few things, Finn.’ She smiled. ‘Quite a lot, in fact. And you?’

Nothing, he wanted to say. I’ve just lost something. Before I had it.

‘Don’t know.’

He would never see her again either. He would stay out of everyone’s way. The world was full of lonely places, it
was
a lonely place. You didn’t have to go to the Moon to find one of those. Heidrun opened her lips and raised a hand as if to touch him.

‘In our next life,’ she said quietly.

‘But there’s only this one here,’ he answered roughly.

She nodded, lowered her head and slipped past him. A strand of her hair passed across his face and tickled his nose.

‘
Mein Schatz
,’ he heard Walo say. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Coming, sweetie!’

The lump was starting to hurt. Finn O’Keefe stared at his helmet, turned round and drifted after the others, his mind a blank.

* * *

Midnight had just gone. It had been such an effort to quell the excitement of the last few days that no one felt much like reviving it with caffeine, so everyone pounced on fruit juice and tea in the Picard. Julian would have liked to have some soup, but because eating soup in micro-gravity was pretty much a no-no, there was lasagne. He sawed a piece of it off and disappeared into the tunnel that led down to the suites, to phone the Earth from there.

Dana Lawrence joined him.

‘Not hungry?’ he asked.

‘No, I am. I just left my report in the Charon.’

He stopped outside his cabin, balancing his lasagne. Did this woman make any sense at all? In Gaia, she had proved her mettle, she had challenged the traitor
Kokoschka and finished off Carl Hanna. Lynn couldn’t have made a better choice, and yet, thinking about it, it was the fact that any other choice was rationally unthinkable that unsettled him. Perhaps it was because of the image he had of women, of people in general, that he couldn’t make head or tail of her. He couldn’t imagine her bursting into tears or bursting out laughing. Her Madonna face with its heart-shaped mouth and piercing eyes made him think of a replicant, of Brooke Adams’ post-pod character in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, in the scene in which she opens her mouth and emits the hollow, unearthly scream of an alien. Clearly very intelligent and passably attractive, Dana Lawrence was miles away from any kind of passion.