And warmer.
‘What’s that noise?’ Miranda Winter wondered. ‘Voom, voom! Is that normal?’
And true enough, a dull rumble mingled with the soundtrack, coming from the depths of the mountain, and creating a menacing atmosphere. Reddish wisps of smoke drifted over the rock.
‘There’s something there,’ Aileen Donoghue whispered. ‘Some sort of light.’
‘God, Lynn,’ laughed Marc Edwards. ‘Where are you taking us?’
‘We must be quite deep already, aren’t we?’ It was the first time Rebecca Hsu had spoken. Since her arrival she had been constantly on the phone, and nobody had been able to engage her.
‘Just over eighty metres,’ said Lynn. She stepped briskly on, towards another turn, bathed in flickering firelight.
‘Exciting,’ O’Keefe observed.
‘Oh, come on, it’s just theatre,’ Warren Locatelli announced from above. ‘We’re entering a strange world, is what they’re trying to suggest. The inside of the Earth, the interior of a strange planet, some waffle like that.’
‘Just wait,’ said Lynn.
‘What’s she got for us this time?’ Momoka Omura said, striving for disenchantment, while the tone of her voice revealed that streams of lava were starting to flow in her head again. ‘A cave, another cave. Brilliant.’
The rumbling and roaring rose in a crescendo.
‘So, I think it’s—’ Evelyn Chambers began, stopped in the middle of the sentence and said, ‘Oh, my!’
They had passed the bend. Monstrous heat came roaring at them. The passageway widened, suffused with a pulsating glow. Some of the guests came to an abrupt standstill, others ventured hesitantly forwards. On the right-hand side the rock opened up, providing a glimpse into a huge, adjacent vault, from which the thundering and roaring emanated, drowning out their conversation. A glowing lake half filled the chamber, boiling and bubbling, spitting red and yellow fountains. Basalt spikes jutted from the sluggish surge towards the domed ceiling, which flickered spectrally in the glow. With quiet delight, Lynn studied fear, fascination, astonishment; she saw Heidrun Ögi shielding herself against the heat with her raised hands. Her white hair, her skin seemed to be blazing. As she uncertainly approached, she looked for a moment as if she had just emerged from some inferno.
‘What on earth is that?’ she asked in disbelief.
‘A magma chamber,’ Lynn explained calmly. ‘A store that keeps the volcano fed with lava and gases. Such chambers form when liquid rock rises from a great depth to the weak areas of the Earth’s crust. As soon as pressure in the chamber gets out of control, the lava forces its way up, and the eruption occurs.’
‘But didn’t you say the volcano was extinct?’ Mukesh Nair said in amazement.
‘Officially extinct, yes.’
Suddenly everyone was talking at the same time. O’Keefe was the first to voice some suspicion. During the whole excursion he had been strolling thoughtfully along the passageway, absorbed, keeping his distance; now he walked right up to the seething cauldron.
‘Hé, mon ami!’ called Tautou. ‘Don’t singe your hair.’
‘Pas de problème,’ O’Keefe turned round and grinned. ‘I hardly think there’s anything to be afraid of. Isn’t that right, Lynn?’
He held out his right hand. His fingers touched a surface. Warm, but not hot. Entirely smooth. He pressed the palm of his hand against it and smiled appreciatively.
‘When was the last time it looked like this inside the mountain?’
Lynn smiled.
‘According to the geologists, about a hundred thousand years ago. But not as far up. Magma chambers usually lie at a depth of twenty-five to thirty kilometres, and they’re much bigger than this one.’
‘Anyway, it’s the best hologram I’ve seen in ages.’
‘We do our best to please.’
‘A hologram?’ echoed Sushma.
‘More precisely, an interplay of holographic projections with sound, coloured light and thermal panels.’
Sushma stepped up beside O’Keefe and tapped her finger against the surface of the screen, as if there might still be a chance that he was mistaken. ‘But it looks perfectly real!’
‘Of course. We don’t want to bore you, after all.’
Everybody touched the screen now, stepped respectfully back and yielded once more to the illusion. Chuck Donoghue forgot to wisecrack, Locatelli to prattle condescendingly. Even Momoka Omura stared into the digital lava lake and looked almost impressed.
‘We’re practically at our destination,’ said Lynn. ‘In a few seconds we’ll be able to enter that chamber, only then it will look completely different. You will be travelling from the distant past to the future of our planet, the future of mankind.’
She tapped a switch hidden in the rock. At the end of the passageway a tall, vertical crack appeared. Faint light seeped from it. The music swelled, powerful and mystical, the crack widened and provided a glimpse of the vault beyond. It really did, in appearance and dimensions, look very much like the holographic depiction, except that there was no lava sloshing about. Instead, there was a kind of theatrical arena suspended above the bottomless pit. Steel walkways led to banked rows of comfortable-looking seats, which hovered freely above the abyss. At the centre there arched a transparent surface measuring at least a thousand square metres in area. Its bottom end was lost in the lightless depths, the top reached to just below the domed ceiling, its sides stretched far beyond the rows of seats.
Standing on the gallery was a lone man.
He was of medium height, slightly squat, and youthful in appearance, although his beard and his long, collar-length hair were grey, and the ash-blond colour of earlier years was a thing of the distant past. He wore a T-shirt and jacket, jeans and cowboy boots. There were rings on his fingers. His eyes flashed jauntily, his grin was like a lighthouse beam.
‘Here you are at last,’ said Julian Orley. ‘Okay, then: let’s rock ’n’ roll!’
Tim stood apart from the others, watching his father greet the guests with handshakes or hugs according to how well he knew them. Julian, the great communicator, laying friendly traps. So keen to meet people that he never doubted for a moment that those people wanted to meet him, and that was exactly what attracted them. The physics of meeting people is based on both attraction and repulsion, but it was practically impossible to escape Julian’s gravitational pull. You were introduced to him and you instantly felt warm familiarity. Two, three more times and you were lost in memories of old times together that had never existed. Julian didn’t do much, he came out with no quips, he didn’t practise speeches in front of the mirror, he just took it for granted that in Newton’s two-body system he was the planet and not the satellite.
‘Carl, old man! Lovely to have you here!’
‘Evelyn, you look fantastic. What idiot ever said the circle was the most perfect form?’
‘Momoka, Warren. Welcome. Oh, and thank you for last time, I’ve been meaning to call for ages. To be quite honest, I have no idea how I got home.’
‘Olympiada Rogacheva! Oleg Rogachev! Isn’t this fantastic? Here we are meeting right now for the first time, and tomorrow we’ll be travelling to the Moon together.’
‘Chucky, old man, I’ve got a great joke for you, but we’ll have to step aside for a minute if you’re to hear it.’
‘Where is my Fairy Queen? Heidrun! I’ve finally met your husband. Did you ever buy that Chagall? – Of course I know about that, I know about all your passions; your wife has been doing nothing but rave about you!’