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‘And crappy weather during the waning moon.’

‘That’s it! Since then the seas in the eastern hemisphere on the Moon have had peaceful, harmonious names, while over in the west it never rains but it pours. And a sea up by the North Pole obviously has to be cold, hence Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold. Oh, look at that! I do believe there’s something coming towards us.’

Evelyn craned her neck. At first she saw nothing but the endless plain and the rails curving away into the distance, then it leapt out at her. A tiny point, hurtling closer, that flew towards them over the rails and became something long and low with blazing headlamps. Then the two trains passed at a speed approaching 1500 kilometres per hour, without the least sound or tremor from where they sat.

‘Helium-3,’ said Julian reverentially. ‘The future.’

And he sat down as though there was nothing further to say.

The Lunar Express flew onward. A little later an enormous mountain range showed on the horizon, becoming taller with amazing speed as though the Mare Frigoris really were a sea and the range were rising from its depths. Evelyn remembered hearing from someone that the effect was down to the Moon’s curvature. Black told them that this was the crater Plato, a splendid example with a diameter of more than a hundred kilometres and walls two and a half thousand metres high, another little splinter of information fired into Evelyn’s overloaded cerebral cortex that stuck there. The Lunar Express swooped smoothly into the Mare Imbrium, the neighbouring desert plain. The freight tracks branched off, as announced, and vanished off to the west, while they went around Plato and left it behind. More mountains reared up on the horizon, the Lunar Alps, harsh-lit and shot through with veins of shadow. The rails reared boldly upwards into the mountains, where the pillars that held up the maglev track clasped hold of the steep cliffs like claws. The higher they climbed, the more breathtaking the view: stark peaks two thousand metres tall, overhangs like Cubist sculpture, sharp saw-toothed ridges. One last look down at the dusty carpet of the Mare Imbrium, then the tracks curved away
into the sea’s hinterland, between peaks and plateaux and onward to the edge of a lunar Grand Canyon, and then—

Evelyn couldn’t believe her eyes.

A sigh of astonishment shuddered through the train. The barely audible hum of the motor joined in with the bass notes of the
Zarathustra
theme, pregnant with mystery, while the Lunar Express slowed and then the first fanfares burst out brightly. Strauss might have been thinking of Nietzsche’s new dawn, while Kubrick used it for the transformation of the human race into something newer, higher, but right at this moment Evelyn was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer whose depths she had plumbed enthusiastically in her youth, and she remembered one sentence from his work, the terrifying ending of
Arthur Gordon Pym
:

But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

She held her breath.

Ten, maybe twelve kilometres away from them, atop a plateau, high above a promontory that jutted out like a terrace beneath it and then fell away into a steep canyon, something sat, gazing up at Earth.

A person.

No, it had the shape of a human form. Not a man’s shape, but a woman’s, perfectly proportioned. Her head, limbs and body gleamed gently in front of the endless sea of stars. No expression on that face, no mouth, eyes or nose, but still there was something soulful, almost yearning in her posture as she sat there with her legs hanging over the edge and her arms out to the side, supporting her, elbows straight, her whole attention focused on that silent, distant planet above her where she would never walk.

She was at least two hundred metres tall.

If Loreena Keowa hadn’t already been the best-known face of Greenwatch, they would have had to invent her.

There was no mistaking her ancestry. She was one hundred per cent Tlingit, a member of the nation that had inhabited the south-east coast of Alaska since time immemorial and whose ancestral homeland included parts of the Yukon Territory
and British Columbia. There were about 8000 Tlingit left, with numbers falling. Only a few hundred of the old people still spoke the melodic Na-Dené tongue perfectly, although these days more and more young people like Keowa learned it too, seeing themselves as the standard-bearers of ethnic self-determination in a newly green America.

Keowa came from a Raven clan in Hoonah, the Village on the Cliffs, a Tlingit settlement on Chichagof Island. Now, if she wasn’t spending her time in Vancouver, where Greenwatch was headquartered, she lived forty miles west of Hoonah in Juneau. Her features were unmistakably Indian, but at the same time bore the signs of white ancestry, although to the best of her knowledge no white man had ever married into the clan. Without being good-looking in the classical sense, she had a wild and enticing aura about her that could easily seem romantic. Her long, shining black hair exactly matched what a New York stockbroker might expect Indian hair to look like, whereas her style of dress went dead against all the clichés of the noble savage. As far as she was concerned, you could protect the environment quite as well while dressed in Gucci and Armani. She was clear and factual in her work, and hardly ever launched into polemics. Her reports were known to be well researched, unsparing, but at the same time she managed never to damn a culprit irredeemably. Her enemies called her a walking compromise, the ideal solution for milksop Wall Street eco-activists, while her defenders valued the way she brought people and viewpoints together. Whatever the truth of it, nobody could claim that Green-watch’s success wasn’t largely down to Loreena Keowa. In the past couple of years it had grown from a small internet channel to take front place among America’s ecologically aware TV stations, and had a remarkably good track record when it came to corrections or retractions – no mean feat, given that the race for a scoop on the internet went hand in hand with a worrying lack of research credibility.

It was typical for Greenwatch to feel a crude sort of sympathy for the chief strategist of EMCO, Gerald Palstein, who should really count as their bad guy. But Palstein argued for various green positions, and he’d been the victim of an attack in Calgary when he put an end to something that had always made environmental activists turn purple with rage. At the beginning of the millennium, companies such as ExxonMobil had breathed new life into an area of business that had almost been abandoned, and they had the Bush administration’s full, eco-unfriendly support. This was the exploitation of oil sands, a mixture of sand, water and hydrocarbons with huge reserves in Canada, among other places. The reserves in Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake alone were estimated at 24 billion tonnes, catapulting the country up in the list of oil-rich nations to place two, behind Saudi Arabia. Mind you, it cost three times as much to extract the black gold from the sands as from conventional
sources, making it a losing business as long as the price per barrel hovered between twenty and thirty dollars. But in the end, rapidly climbing prices had justified the intensive investment, thanks also to Canada’s proximity to the thirsty primary consumer, the USA, grateful for every oil supplier that wasn’t an Arab nation. The oil companies pounced on the slumbering reserves with dollar signs in their eyes, and within a very short time this led to the complete destruction of the boreal forest in Alberta, the moorland biotopes, the rivers and lakes. Additionally, 80 kilos of green-house gas were released into the atmosphere for every barrel of this synthetic oil extracted, and four barrels of polluted water flowed out to poison the land.

But the price per barrel collapsed, for ever. Open-cast extraction stopped overnight, leaving the companies that had driven the business unable to repair the damaged ecosystems. All that was left were ravaged tracts of land, increased incidence of cancer in the population – and companies such as Imperial Oil, a traditional business headquartered in Calgary, which for almost 150 years had made its money from extracting and refining oil and natural gas, and, in the end, increasingly from oil sands. Just as it was at the forefront of the industry, the lights went out, and Palstein, strategic director of the majority shareholder EMCO, which owned about two-thirds of Imperial Oil, had to go to Alberta to tell the management and a stunned workforce that they were being let go.

Perhaps because it was more effective to vent anger on one man than on the ohso-distant Moon, whose resources had led to the disaster, somebody shot at Palstein in Calgary. The deed of a desperate man, at least so most people saw it.

Loreena Keowa thought that there were good grounds for scepticism.

Not that she had an answer either. But how long could an embittered, unemployed shooter expect to escape justice? The attempted killing had been one month ago. A great many things about the theory of an enraged lone gunman didn’t make sense, and since Keowa was working anyway on a feature about the environmental destruction wreaked by the oil companies,
Trash of the Titans
, it made sense to her that she should look into the case in her own way. Even before helium-3, Palstein had been vocal about the need for his industry to switch direction. He was on record as being no friend of the oil-sands project, and she felt that he had been unfairly treated at the press conference in Anchorage. So she had offered him a TV portrait that would show him in a better light. In exchange, she hoped for some inside information about EMCO, the crumbling giant, and more even than that, she was excited at the thought of being able to help clear up the shooting, in the best tradition of American investigative journalism.

Maybe even solving the case.

Palstein had hesitated a while, and in the end invited her to visit him in Texas, in
his house on the shore of Lake Lavon. He was convalescing from his injury here, and recovering from being the bearer of bad news. He made one condition: that for the first conversation, she should turn up without her camera team.

‘We’ll need pictures though,’ Keowa had said. ‘We’re a TV channel.’

‘You’ll get some. As long as I feel that I can trust you. But I can only take so many knocks, Loreena. We’ll sound one another out for an hour, and then you can fetch your crew. Or maybe not.’

Now, in the taxi bringing them downtown from the airport, Keowa went through her material one more time. Her camera crew and sound technician were lolling on the back seat, wrung out by the humid heat that lay across Texas far too early this year. EMCO was headquartered next door in Irving, but Palstein lived on the other side of town. They had a light lunch in the Dallas Sheraton, then Palstein’s driver arrived at the agreed time to fetch Keowa. They left town and drove through the untouched green belt, until the glittering surface of the lake became visible through the trees to the left. It had been a bumpy flight, followed by a plunge into the sauna-like Dallas temperatures, and she enjoyed the ride in an air-conditioned electric van. After a while the driver turned off into a smaller road and then onto a private driveway that led along the water to Palstein’s house, which looked, she mused, something like what she had been expecting. Palstein would have stuck out like a sore thumb in a ranch with buffalo horns and a pillared veranda. This was an airy arrangement of Cubist buildings around green open spaces, with glass frontages, soaring slender framework and walls that seemed almost weightless; all this suited his character much better.

The driver let her out. A well-built man in slacks and a T-shirt came towards her and asked politely for some identification. Two more men were patrolling down by the quay. She handed him her ID card, and he held it to the scanner on his phone. He seemed happy with what the screen told him, gave it back to her with a smile and beckoned her to follow him. They hurried through a Japanese garden and past a large swimming-pool, to a jetty where a boat was tied up.

‘Do you feel like a ride?’

Palstein was leaning against a bollard, waiting for her in front of a trim, snow-white yacht with a tall mast and furled sails. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt and looked healthier than last time they had met in Anchorage. The sling on his arm had gone. Keowa pointed to his shoulder.

‘Feeling better?’

‘Thanks.’ He took her hand and shook it briefly. ‘It tugs a little sometimes. Did you have a good flight, Shax’ saani Keek’?’

Keowa laughed, caught out. ‘You know my Indian name?’

‘Why not?’

‘Hardly anybody does!’

‘Etiquette demands that I keep myself informed. Shax’ saani Keek’ – in Tlingit that means
the younger sister of the girls
, am I right?’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘And I’m probably an old show-off.’ Palstein smiled. ‘So, what do you say? I can’t offer to take you sailing, that wouldn’t work yet with my shoulder, but the outboard works and there are cold drinks on board.’

Under other circumstances Keowa would have been suspicious. But what would have seemed manipulative from anyone else, was just what it seemed coming from Palstein: an invitation from a man who liked his boat and wanted to share a trip.

‘Lovely house,’ said Keowa, once they had motored out a little way from the shore. The heat stood there like a block over the water, not a whisper of a breeze ruffled the lake surface, but all the same it was more bearable than on land. Palstein looked back and then was silent for a minute, as though considering for the first time whether his homestead could be called beautiful.

‘It’s based on a design by Mies van der Rohe. Do you know his work?’

Keowa shook her head.

‘In my view, he’s the most important modern architect there was. A German, a great constructivist and a logical thinker. He aimed to tame the chaotic mess that technological civilisation churned out and frame it with order and structure. Mind you, he didn’t consider that order necessarily meant drawing lines and boundaries – he wanted to create as much open space as possible, a seamless transition between inside and out.’