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They had assembled for communicative relaxation exercises in the Mama Quilla Club, and were trying to quell their anxiety about the continued absence of the Ganymede by vociferously going through the day’s events. In the western Mare Tranquillitatis they had admired the landing console of the very first lunar module, in which Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the satellite in 1969. The area was considered a culturally protected area, along with three little craters, named after the pioneers and the third man, Collins, who had had to stay in the spaceship. Even during their approach, from a great height, the museum, as the region was generally known, had revealed the full banality of man’s arrival. Small and parasitic, like a fly on the hide of an elephant, the console stuck to the regolith, and Armstrong’s famous bootprint lay in splendour under a glass case. A place for pilgrims. Doubtless there were more magnificent cathedrals, and yet Ögi was right when he felt there was something in it that bestowed significance and greatness on the human race. It was the certainty that they wouldn’t have been able to stand there if those men hadn’t taken the journey through the airless wastes and performed the miracle of the first moon landing. So what they felt was respect, in the end. Later that afternoon, in the view of the infinite-looking wall of Rupes Recta, which looked as if the whole Moon continued on a level 200 metres higher up, they had succumbed to the sublimity of the cosmic architecture, deeply impressed, admittedly, but without feeling the curiously touching power emanated by the pitiful memorabilia of human presence in the Mare Tranquillitatis. At that moment most of them had understood that they were not pioneers. No one said hello to a pioneer. He was greeted not by shabby metal frames, not by bootprints, but only by loneliness, the unknown.

Lynn Orley and Dana Lawrence made a great effort to keep the cheerful chitchat going until Olympiada Rogacheva set down her glass and said, ‘I’d like to talk to my husband now.’

The others fell silent. Clammy consternation settled on the gathering. She had just broken an unspoken covenant that they should not worry, but somehow everyone seemed happy about it, particularly Chuck, who had already had to tell three miserable jokes just to drown out the sound of his menacingly grumbling belly.

‘Come on, Dana,’ he blustered. ‘What’s going on? What are you not telling us?’

‘A satellite breakdown is nothing serious, Mr Donoghue.’

‘Chuck.’

‘Chuck. For example a mini-meteorite the size of a grain of sand can temporarily paralyse a satellite, and the LPCS—’

‘But you don’t need the LPCS. Armstrong’s gang didn’t have an LPCS.’

‘I can assure you that the technical defect will soon be repaired. That will take a while, but soon we’ll be in contact with the Earth exactly as we were before.’

‘It’s odd, though, having no sign of them,’ said Aileen.

‘Not at all.’ Lynn gave a strained smile. ‘You know Julian. He’s organised a huge schedule. He said even this morning that they’d probably be late. And by the way, have you seen the system of grooves between the Mare Tranquillitatis and the Sinus Medii? You must have done, when you flew to Rupes Recta.’

‘Yes, they look like streets,’ said Hsu, and the whistling in the forest resumed.

Olympiada stared straight ahead. Winter noticed her catatonia, stopped licking at the sugar rim of her strawberry daiquiri, edged closer and put a tanned arm around her narrow, drooping shoulders.

‘Don’t worry, sweetie. You’ll have him back soon enough.’

‘I feel so shabby,’ Olympiada replied quietly.

‘Why shabby?’

‘So miserable. So useless. When you really want to talk to somebody you despise, just because there’s no one else there, it’s pitiful.’

‘But you’ve got us!’ Winter murmured, and kissed her on the temple, a seal of sisterhood. Only then did she seem to understand what Olympiada had just said. ‘So what do you mean, despise? Not Oleg, surely?’

‘Who else?’

‘Hmph! You despise Oleg?’

‘We despise each other.’

Winter considered those words. She tried out, one at a time, a collection of suitable-seeming facial expressions: amazement, reflection, sympathy, puzzlement; she studied the outward appearance of the Russian woman as if seeing her for the very first time. Olympiada’s evening wear, a catsuit, one of Mimi Parker’s, that changed colour according to the wearer’s state of mind, hung on her as if it had been thrown over the back of a chair, eyeliner and jewellery competed to remove
the traces of years of neglect and marital suffering. She could have looked so much better. A bit of botox in her cheeks and forehead, hyaluron to smooth the wrinkles around her mouth, a little implant here and there to firm up her confidence and her connective tissues. At that moment she decided to have the implants in her own bottom changed as soon as they got back. There was something wrong with them, if you sat on them for too long.

‘Why don’t you just leave him?’ she asked.

‘Why doesn’t a doormat leave the front door that it lies outside?’ Olympiada mused.

Oh, God almighty! Winter was puzzled. Of course she found herself irresistible in all her firm glory, but did you really have to look like a gym-ripped Valkyrie to be spared the sorts of thoughts that Olympiada wallowed in?

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I think you’re making a mistake. A big fat error of reasoning.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. You think you’re shabby because you think no one wants you, so you allow yourself to be shabbily treated, just to be treated at all.’

‘Hmm.’

‘But the truth is that no one wants you because you feel shabby. You understand? The other way round. Casuality, causality or whatever it’s called, that thing with cause and effect, I’m not that educated, but I know that’s how it works. You
think
other people think you’re crap, so you feel crap and look crap, and in the end what everyone sees is crap, so it comes full circle. Am I making myself understood? A kind of inner – prejudgement. Because in fact you’re your own biggest, erm … enemy. And because at some level you enjoy it. You
want
to suffer.’

Wow, that sounded awesome! As if she’d been to college.

‘You think?’ Olympiada asked, and looked at Winter from the gloomy November puddles that were her eyes.

‘Of course!’ She liked this, it was getting really psychological. She ought to do this kind of thing more often. ‘And you know why you want to suffer? Because you’re looking for confirmation! Because you think you’re, as we’ve seen, you think you’re—’ Vocabulary, Miranda, vocabulary! Not just crap, what’s another word? ‘Shit. You think you’re shit, nothing else, but being shit is still better than being nothing at all, and if someone else thinks you’re shit too, you understand, then that’s a crystal-clear confirmation of what you think.’

‘Heavens above.’

‘Misery is reliable, believe me.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, it is, feeling shit gives you something to depend on. What do people say
when they go to church? God, I am sinful, worthless, I’ve done terrible things, even before I was born, I’m a miserable piece of filth, forgive me, and if you can’t that’s okay too, you’re right, I’m just an ant, an original ant—’

‘Original ant?’

‘Yes, original something or other!’ She gesticulated wildly, as if intoxicated. ‘There’s something like that in Christian stuff, where you’re the lowest of the low from the get-go. That’s exactly how you feel. You think suffering is home. Wrong. Suffering is shit.’

‘You never suffer?’

‘Of course I do, like a dog! You know that. I was an alcoholic, I was described as the worst actress ever, I was in jail, up before the court. Wow!’ She laughed, in love with the disaster of her own biography. ‘That was out of order.’

‘But why does none of that matter to you?’

‘It does, it does! Bad luck really matters to me.’

‘But you don’t think that from the outset you’re, erm—’

‘No.’ Winter shook her head. ‘Just briefly, when I was drinking. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what I was talking about here. But not fundamentally.’

Olympiada smiled for the first time that evening, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure that her face was made for it.

‘Will you tell me a secret, Miranda?’

‘Anything, darling.’

‘How do you become like you?’

‘No idea.’ Winter reflected, thought seriously about the question. ‘I think you need a certain lack of … imagination.’

‘Lack of
imagination
?’

‘Yes.’ She laughed a whinnying laugh. ‘Just imagine, I have no imagination. Not a scrap. I can’t see myself the way others do. I mean, I can see that they think I’m cool, that they undress me with their eyes, fine. But otherwise I see myself only through my own eyes, and if I don’t like something I change it. I just can’t imagine how other people want me to be, so I don’t try to be that way.’ She paused and indicated to Funaki that her glass was empty. ‘And now you stop seeing yourself through Oleg’s eyes, okay? You’re nice, really nice! Oh, my God, you’re a member of the Russian – what is it again?’

‘Parliament.’

‘And rich and everything! And where your appearance is concerned, okay, fine, I’ll be honest with you, but give me four weeks and I’ll make a femme fatale out of you! You don’t need any of that, Olympiada. You certainly don’t need to miss Oleg.’

‘Hmm.’

‘You know what?’ She gripped Olympiada’s upper arm and lowered her voice. ‘Now I’ll tell you a real secret: men only make women feel they’re shit because they feel shit themselves. You get it? They try to break our confidence, they try to steal it from us because they have none themselves. Don’t do that! Don’t let them do that to you! You have to fly your own flag, honey. You’re not what he wants you to be.’ Complicated sentence structure, but it worked. She was getting better and better.

‘He might never come back,’ Olympiada murmured, apparently spotting a path opening up into sunnier climes.

‘Exactly. Fuck him.’

Olympiada sighed. ‘Okay.’

‘Michio, my darling,’ Winter crowed, and waved her empty glass. ‘One of these for my friend!’

* * *

Sophie Thiel was stumbling around in betrayal and deception when Tim came into the control centre. A dozen windows on the big multimedia wall reanimated the past.

‘Totally fake,’ said Sophie listlessly.

He watched people crossing the lobby, entering the control centre, going about their work, leaving it. Then the rooms lay there again, gloomy and desperate, lit only by the harsh reflection of the sunlight on the edge of the gorge and the controls of the tireless machinery that kept the hotel alive. Sophie pointed to one of the shots. The camera angle was arranged in such a way that you could make out the far side of the Vallis Alpina, with mountains and monorail through the panoramic window.

‘The control centre, deserted. That night when Hanna went out on the Lunar Express.’

Tim narrowed his eyes and leaned forward.

‘Don’t try just yet, you won’t get to see him. Your sister would say it’s because no one went anywhere. In fact, someone’s hoodwinking us with the oldest trick in the book. You see that thing blinking on the right-hand edge of the video wall?’

‘Yes.’

‘At almost exactly the same time something lights up down here, and there, a bit further on, an indicator light comes on. You see? Trivial things that no one would normally notice, but I’ve taken the trouble to look for matches. Take a look at the timecode.’

05.53, Tim read.

‘You’ll find exactly the same sequence at ten past five.’

‘Coincidence?’

‘Not if close analysis reveals a tiny jump in the shadow on the Moon’s surface. The sequence was copied and added to hide an event that lasted just two minutes.’

‘The arrival of the Lunar Express,’ whispered Tim.

‘Yes, and that’s exactly how it goes on. Hanna in the corridor, edited out, just like your father said. The control centre, apparently empty. But there was someone there. Someone who sat here and changed these videos; he’s just cut himself out. Perfectly done, the whole thing. The lobby, a different perspective that would show you Mr X coming into the control centre, but also faked, unfortunately.’

‘Someone must have spent an endless amount of time over it,’ Tim said, amazed.

‘No, it’s pretty fast if you know what needs to be done.’

‘Astounding!’

‘Frustrating above all, because it doesn’t get us anywhere. Now we know
that
it was done. But not
who
did it.’

Tim pursed his lips. Suddenly he had an idea.

‘Sophie, if we can trace back
when
the work on the videos was done – if we could take a look at the records – I mean, can you manipulate the records as well?’

She frowned. ‘Only if you take a lot of trouble.’

‘But it could be done?’

‘Basically it couldn’t. The intervention would be recorded as well. Hmm. I see.’

‘If we knew the exact times of the interventions, we could match them with the presence and absence of the guests and the staff. Who was where at the time in question? Who saw who? Our mystery person can’t possibly have changed
all
the data in the hotel system in the time available to him. So as soon as we see the records—’

‘We’ll have him.’ Sophie nodded. ‘But to do that we’d need an authorisation program.’

‘I’ve got one.’

‘What?’ She looked at him in surprise. ‘An authorisation program for this system?’

‘No, a common or garden little mole that I downloaded from the net last winter to look at a colleague’s data. With his permission,’ he added quickly. ‘His system did a screen shot every sixty seconds, and I had to get at those shots, but I didn’t have authorisation. So I resorted to the knowledge of some of my students. One of them recommended Gravedigger, an, erm, a not entirely legal reconstruction program, but one that’s quite easy to get hold of and compatible with almost every system. I kept it. It’s on my computer, and my computer—’

‘—is here in Gaia.’

‘Bingo.’ Tim grinned. ‘In my room.’

Sophie smiled broadly. ‘Right, Mr Orley, so if you don’t mind—’

‘I’m on my way.’