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‘So what do we do with that now?’ she laughed.

‘There must be a way.’ He was determined. ‘People must have thought about this.’

‘Hopefully. It’d be a shame if they hadn’t.’

Tim did a handstand and ploughed over to her. This time, he managed to get a grip on her hips and buried his head between her legs, which she spread and then immediately closed again to keep his head in place. As a result, the blood rushed to his ears. Circling his tongue, he pressed ahead, capturing the tiny mound beneath the small forest, the density of which threatened to take his breath away as he pressed his nose inside her out of fear of ending up at the other end of the room again, becoming intoxicated by the blend of their lust and countering her first, blissful sighs – provided that his ears, packed tightly between her thighs, weren’t deceiving him – with muffled agreement. An overdose of oxygen seemed to mingle with the cabin air – or was it the lack of oxygen that suddenly made him feel as high as a schoolboy?
Who cared! Joyfully exhilarated, he made his way deeper inside, panting, grunting, the tip of his tongue flying dedicatedly around. At the moment when the tropical dampness of deep-lying realms opened up to him, believing he heard a declaration of love burst forth, he couldn’t hold back and mumbled a ‘Me too, oh, me too’, but got a puzzling response.

‘Ow! Ouch!’

Something had clearly gone wrong. Tim looked up. In doing so, he made the mistake of loosening his grip. Amber flailed around as if she were drowning, kicking him from her. Pushed away, he saw that she was rubbing her head, and that it was in the immediate vicinity of the edge of the desk. Aha. He should have thought of that, that they would drift away in the heat of the moment. Lesson number one: it wasn’t enough to clasp on to each other, they needed to fix themselves within the room too. He couldn’t help but laugh. Amber wrinkled her nose and frowned, then his gaze fell on something that could offer a solution.

‘Look!’

‘What?’ She dug the fingers of her right hand into his hair and tried to bite his nose, which resulted in her doing a somersault. Tim hopped over to the bed like a frog, pulling Amber, still head over heels, along with him.

‘Buckling ourselves in?’ she snorted mockingly. ‘How unerotic. It’d be like doing it in a car. We’ll hardly be able to move—’

‘No, silly, not with the sleeping belt. Look!’

Amber’s expression brightened. Above the bed were some handles, mounted a little distance apart from one another.

‘Wait. I think I saw something that might go with them.’

She hurried over to the cupboard, opened it, rummaged around and unearthed several long bands made from a rubber-like material. They had a red, yellow and green pattern and were adorned with a slogan.

‘
Love Belt
,’ she read.

‘So there you go,’ grinned Tim. ‘People
did
think about it.’ For the first time since they’d set off on the journey, he felt carefree and playful, a sensation which just an hour ago he had thought was gone for good. Lynn didn’t become entirely insignificant, of course, but just retreated to an insignificant province of his cortex, one that wasn’t attending to Amber’s scent and the throbbing desire to fuck her. ‘It looks like we have to fasten you by the wrists, my darling. No, by the hands and feet. Like in the torture chambers of the Holy Inquisition.’

She started to thread the bands through the handles.

‘I think you misunderstood,’ she said. ‘You’re the one getting tied up.’

‘Now just a minute! We need to talk about this first.’

‘Do you think he wants to talk about it?’ she asked, gesturing her head at his royal member. ‘I think he wants to do something else, and very quickly too.’

One after the other, she knotted the rubber bands around his wrists and, giggling and snorting, made her way down to fasten his feet, until he was hung in the middle of the room with his extremities stretched out. He wriggled his knees and elbows with curiosity, noticing that the bands were highly elasticated. He could move around, and generously too. It was just stopping him from flying away.

‘Do you think this was Julian’s idea?’ he asked.

‘I’d be willing to bet on it.’ Amber hovered towards him as if she were on a control beam, clasped his shoulders and slung her legs around his hips. For a moment, her sex balanced on his, like a trapeze artist on the nose of a sea lion.

‘In my opinion, sexual positions are the most demanding manoeuvres in the world,’ she whispered as she pressed herself against him, lowered herself and drew him inside her.

* * *

Seemingly quite a few people had the same idea, but only a few managed to put it into action. Eva Borelius and Karla Kramp also found the straps and figured out what to do with them, as did Mimi Parker and Marc Edwards. However, Edwards found the redistribution of over half a litre of blood from the lower to upper bodily regions a little harder to handle than Tim had, whilst Paulette Tautou would most likely have held Bernard’s head down the now-so-familiar toilet bowl if he had come near her with any intentions of that sort.

Wisely, Tautou did no such thing. Instead, in consideration of Paulette’s miserable condition, he decided that they should embark on the journey home.

Suite 12 was the scene of similar suffering, the only difference being that Locatelli would never have capitulated to something as mundane as space sickness. Peaceful silence reigned in Suite 38, where the Ögis lay snuggled up to one another like field-mice in winter. One floor above, Sushma and Mukesh Nair were peacefully enjoying the sight of night falling over the Isla de las Estrellas. In Suite 17, Aileen Donoghue had put in her earplugs, allowing Chuck to snore at the top of his lungs.

On the opposite side of the torus, Oleg Rogachev was staring out of the window while Olympiada Rogacheva stared straight ahead.

‘Do you know what I’d like to know?’ she murmured after a while.

He shook his head.

‘How someone ends up like Miranda Winter.’

‘You don’t end up like that,’ he said, without turning round. ‘You’re born like it.’

‘I don’t mean the way she looks,’ snorted Olympiada. ‘I’m not stupid. I just want to know how someone gets to be so impregnable. So completely pain-free. It’s as if
she’s a walking immune system against every kind of problem, she’s like nonchalance personified – I mean, seriously, she’s even given names to her breasts!’

Rogachev turned his head slowly.

‘No one’s stopping you from doing the same.’

‘Perhaps a certain amount of it is down to stupidity,’ ruminated Olympiada, as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘You know, I really do believe that Miranda is quite dumb. Oh, what am I saying, she hasn’t got two brain cells to rub together. I have no doubt that she’s lacking any kind of education, but perhaps that’s an advantage. Perhaps it’s good to be stupid, desirable even. Dumb and naïve and a little bit calculating. You feel less that way. Miranda loves only herself, whereas it seems to me that every single day I’m pouring all my feelings, all my strength into a vase that’s full of holes. Your meanness would be wasted on someone like Miranda, Oleg, like a pinprick in blubber.’

‘I’m not mean to you.’

‘Oh, no?’

‘No. I’m just uninterested. You can’t hurt someone you have no interest in.’

‘And you suppose that’s not mean?’

‘It’s the truth.’ Rogachev glanced at her for a second. Olympiada had burrowed into her sleeping bag and was now belted in and safely out of reach. For a moment he wondered what it might be like if the sack burst open the next morning to reveal a butterfly, an astonishing feat for his rather retarded imagination. But Olympiada wasn’t a caterpillar, and he had no intention of weaving her into a cocoon. ‘Our marriage was a strategic move. I knew it, your father knew it, and you knew it too. So please stop torturing yourself.’

‘One day you’ll fall, Oleg,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll end up like a rat. A damn rat in the gutter.’

Rogachev turned to gaze again out of the window, strangely unmoved by the planet darkening below him.

‘Just get on with it and take a lover,’ he said tonelessly.

* * *

Miranda Winter had no intention of heading off to bed any time soon, much to the joy of Rebecca Hsu, who suffered from her inability to cope with being alone. Except that she was alone. A poor, rich woman, as she went to great pains to convince herself, twice divorced, with three daughters of whom she saw shamefully little. A woman who hung around in the company of others until even the last few closed their eyes, after which she would make calls across all the time zones thanks to the world-spanning structure of her group of companies, until even she lost the fight against tiredness. The whole day through, whenever their strictly organised
schedule allowed, she had been discussing marketing plans by phone, debating campaign strategies, deliberating purchases, sales and shares. Keeping an eye on her empire: a control freak who was tormented by the thought that she’d driven husbands and daughters away with her manic working habits.

At least she could discuss the lack of husbands with Miranda without falling head first into melancholy afterwards. Besides, some of the beakers of Moët et Chandon had miraculously turned up in Miranda’s cabin, which particularly pleased Rebecca, since she had owned the brand for some time now.

Finn O’Keefe didn’t know what to think or feel, so he listened to music for a while then fell asleep.

Evelyn Chambers lay awake – if it could be called lying, that is.

She didn’t feel the slightest inclination to buckle herself onto the bed like some raving lunatic. She had discovered the rubber bands by chance and anchored herself to the handles near the front of the window, hoping to enjoy the sensation of zero gravity in her sleep too. But when she closed her eyes her body seemed to speed up as if it were on a roller-coaster, trying to loop the loop, and she started to feel sick.

She reached up to free her shackled ankles from the bands, which was no easy task. It was only then that she noticed the inscription:
Love Belt
. Suddenly realising what they were really intended for, a wave of regret washed over her at not being able to appropriately crown the extravagant experience of zero gravity. Intrigued, she wondered whether the others were doing it, and then – rather boldly – whom
she
might be able to do it with! Her thoughts darted from Miranda Winter to Heidrun Ögi and then back again, based on the fact that Heidrun wasn’t available, although admittedly neither was Miranda, if only due to lack of inclination.

Rebecca Hsu? Oh, for heaven’s sake!

Her desire subsided as quickly as it had risen. And yet she had been so adamant, after her bisexuality had cost her the role of governor, that she was going to enjoy herself properly now. She was still America’s most popular and influential chat-show host. In the wake of her political Waterloo she no longer felt bound to any conservative code. What had remained of her marriage barely justified professing monogamy, especially as her so-called husband was pouring their joint money into his constantly changing acquaintances. Not that that bothered her. Their love had gone down the drain years ago, but she didn’t want to go to bed with anyone and everyone, even if she was consumed by lust.

Although perhaps in exceptional circumstances—

Finn O’Keefe. It was worth a try. It would certainly be fun to snare him of all people, but the thought quickly soured.

Julian?

He clearly loved flirting with her. But on the other hand Julian’s job meant he flirted with everyone. Still. He was unattached, apart from the affair with Nina Hedegaard, if they were even still having one and it wasn’t just her reading too much into it. If she yielded to Julian’s advances there would be little danger of hurting anyone else, and they would have fun, she was sure of that. Perhaps something more might even come out of it. And if not, that was fine too.

On the spur of the moment, she dialled the number of his suite.

But no one answered, the screen stayed dark. Feeling foolish all of a sudden, like a sparrow pecking around beneath restaurant tables for food from other people’s plates, she crawled hurriedly into her sleeping bag.

* * *

‘You had them hanging on your every word.’

‘But I wasn’t even the first.’

Julian raised his eyebrows.

‘2013,’ said Bowie. ‘Chris Hadfield – this ISS astronaut. He was the first person in the world to sing “Space Oddity” in space.’

‘Correct, and it wasn’t bad at all. But you’re the original. You
had
to come up here and sing it!’

Bowie smiled. ‘Obviously.’

‘And you’re quite sure?’

‘
Quite
sure.’

‘Tautou told me that Madame wants them to come back to earth together. We would have room.’ Julian sucked at his bottle. ‘Oh, nonsense, forget the Tautous! We’d have room even if they did come. I’ve always got room for you.’

They were the only ones left in the dimly lit Picard, sucking at their alcohol-free cocktails. Bowie rolled the bottle between his fingers thoughtfully.

‘Thanks, Julian. But I’ll pass.’

‘But why? It’s your chance to go to the Moon. You’re the star man, you’re that guy in
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, you’re Ziggy Stardust! Who, if not you? You
have
to go to the Moon.’

‘Well, for a start I’m seventy-eight years old.’

‘And? You can’t tell. You once said you wanted to live to be three hundred. Compared to that you’re still a kid.’

Bowie laughed.

‘So?’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Are you going to get the money together for a second lift?’

‘Of course,’ boomed Julian. ‘Shall we bet on it?’

‘No more bets. What’s going on with the Chinese anyway? I heard they’re pestering you with offers.’

‘Officially they’re doing nothing of the sort, but between ourselves they’re kowtowing like mad. Does the name Zheng Pang-Wang mean anything to you?’

‘Not off the top of my head.’

‘The Zheng Group.’

‘Ah!’ Bowie wrinkled his brow. ‘Yes, I think it does actually. They’re a technology company too, right?’