Moonseed

1

The sky was dominated by the sun, a white spotlight too bright to look at. The Earth was there in the blackness, bigger than a full Moon but smaller than Geena had expected, just a thumbnail of blue light in the sky. The brightness of the sun made it impossible to make out the stars, and, away from sun and Earth, the sky was just a jet black, empty.

Standing here on the lander platform, she could see all the way to the horizon, clearer than the finest day on Earth. The sculpted hills of the Aristarchus ejecta blanket rose above this puddle of pitted, frozen basalt, their slopes bathed in sunlight, shining like fresh snow.

But there were no visual cues — no trees or cars or buildings or people, not even haze, to help her judge the distance. And beyond the brightly-lit hills at that horizon there was only blackness, like the space at the edge of a map.

She could see the horizon was close, for it curved, gently but noticeably, the way the Earth looked to curve from fifty thousand feet or so. And in fact she could even see how the land before her curved away, dropping like the brow of a hill, out to the horizon. On this lander platform, she could tell she was standing on a ball of rock and dust, suspended in space; the roundness of this world was no intellectual exercise.

She felt lost.

It just didn’t look the same place as from orbit. Most of the shadows she’d used to guide the landing, particularly those pooled at the bottom of the craters, were invisible now. Not only that, she couldn’t see even the larger craters beyond a hundred feet or so, so flattened was the landscape by her perspective.

Maybe there was just a hint of colour. Golds and tans. But it was washed out, as if poking out from under a layer of dust. Shades of concrete, she thought. It was a little like looking out over her driveway, back in Clear Lake, under the glare of the security night lights.

She didn’t share these non-geological thoughts with Henry.

She looked at the sunlight bathing her gloved hand. The fabric of her sleeve glowed with an intense brightness, as if it had just been manufactured. She thought she could feel, in fact, a ghostly trace of the sun’s warmth, seeping through the layers of cloth surrounding her.

But she shivered, under the black sky. She could feel her heartbeat rise, and hoped it didn’t show up on the monitors on the ground.

For it was wrong. How could so much light be falling on her, and not dispel the darkness above? Some ancient part of her brain, adapted for billions of years to life in the pond-like atmosphere of Earth, seemed to be rebelling against these new conditions.

Going to take some getting used to, she thought. That’s all.

She looked past her feet, the way she now had to climb down, in her role as mission commander, to step on the Moon. The Shoemaker’s footpads had settled barely an inch into the ground, and the little ladder, just two or three steps, was resting neatly against the dust.

Geena released her restraints. They rolled themselves up silently into their holders.

She took a step forward, to the edge of the platform. She was at the centre of a radial array of streaks and stripes, the disturbance they’d made in the ancient dust of the Moon as they descended.

She felt giddy, vertiginous. Ridiculous. She’d ridden down from orbit on this contraption, and now here she was three feet above the dust, and she felt dizzy. But even so, she had to hold onto the control post before she got over it.

She turned to Henry. He was still in his restraints, standing calmly, watching her. His oversuit glowed brilliant white in the unfiltered sunlight. He held out a gloved hand to her.

She took it. Their gloves were so thick she could only feel the bulk of his suit, not his flesh and bone within.

Holding on to Henry, she turned, got hold of the handrail, and bent forward. She put her foot on the top rung of the ladder, then the second.

Her suit was stiff. In this Shuttle EMU it was hard to bend, to lower her feet from rung to rung. She found it was easier to push off and just drop down to the next rung, and the next.

She let go of Henry’s hand.

She pushed away one last time, and her hands slid along the rail… and her feet thumped into Moon dust.

A little spray of dust — ancient pulverized rock, charcoal-black — lifted up around her feet, and settled back. Where it touched her clothing, it stuck.

She said: “We’re back. My God, we did it. We’ve come back to the Moon.”

She heard the sounds from Houston, whooping in her headset, some kind of broken-voiced response from Frank Turtle. But the words were remote and didn’t register.

She moved her foot around over the surface. The dust was soft, queasy, but she wasn’t sinking in too far. She took a few steps. A little cloud of dust tracked around her feet, falling back with neat, liquid grace. The dust seemed to have an affinity for her suit, for it clung to her blue overshoes and the fabric of her leggings, as if she was a magnet attracting iron filings.

She looked around.

She was standing on a textured plain — like a piece of the high desert around Edwards, she thought — and the ground glowed in the sunlight. But the sky remained utterly, unnervingly black. Nothing moved here. There was utter silence. She fought an impulse to turn around, to look to see who was creeping up behind her, in this horror-movie stillness.

She took a few more steps, experimentally.

She couldn’t walk, exactly; her legs wouldn’t bend far enough to let her. This Shuttle suit, meant for zero-G EVAs, was even worse than the old Apollo suits for stiffness. She could move in a kind of jog, rocking from side to side, but the low gravity let her travel further than she wanted to go.

And her balance was off. Her backpack pulled at her, and to compensate she leaned forward as she walked; she felt as if she might fall at any moment. She was somewhere between buoyant and heavy. Weight and mass had been redefined for her. It was more comfortable than either a full gravity or zero G: it had much of the buoyancy of microgravity but without that disconcerting lack of up and down. One-sixth G was weak, but enough to anchor her to the world.

But, when she was still, it was hard for her to tell when she was standing upright. The land was full of gentle rises, and there were no verticals here, no telegraph poles or trees or buildings. Something to do with the gentle tug of the Moon’s gravity on her inner ear, maybe.

The backpack’s pumps and fans whirred, and she could feel the soft rush of oxygen over her face. The pack was a reassuring mass on her back, replete with energy, supplies for heat and cooling, water, air; she was a little bubble of Earth life, she thought, bouncing around on the surface of the Moon.

Maybe fifty yards from the Shoemaker, she turned to face the sun. The light glared through her gold-tinted faceplate. There stood the Shoemaker, Henry on it watching her, a little gold-coloured platform with a white snowman perched on the top. The lander looked strangely light, as if it might blow away. Its gaudy gold and black and silver looked ludicrous: overdesigned, for this gentle, subtle landscape.

Behind the Shoemaker she looked across the width of a big crater, a bowl bigger than a football stadium, shadows stretching across the ground towards her from rocks and craters. She could see the old Apollo lander, nestled close to the crater’s shadowed far wall, a squat, boxy structure, unmistakeable.

And there, only a hundred yards from the Apollo, stood the second Shoemaker, laden with the supplies that would keep them alive.

“How about that,” she said. “Can’t be more than six hundred feet away.” She felt elated — the first lunar landing for more than thirty years, and it was pinpoint accurate. “Outstanding.”

“You got the job,” Henry said drily. “Now, will you help me down from here?”

So here was Henry, unbelievably, standing on the Moon, a geologist on the ultimate field trip. He turned, slowly, trying to understand where he was. The sun dominated seeing on the Moon, he realized immediately.

The sun was like a giant, intensely bright searchlight, pure white, overwhelming everything, and the mental picture he built up of the landscape here depended completely on the angle to the sun.

At zero phase angle — if he looked down-sun, with his own shadow stretching across the untrodden surface — it was difficult for him to make out shadows. Most objects were visible, but the contrasts were washed out. But he could see shadows if he looked cross-sun, so the trick was to look from left to right, to pick up the shadows, and shapes and sizes and glints, and he could orient himself that way. And if he walked up-sun, with the shadows stretching towards him, the sun was very bright, glaring in his visor.

When he looked at his own shadow the sunlight around it came bouncing straight back at him. The shadow of his body was surrounded by a glow, a halo around his helmet.

He inspected the mineral ground. Cinereous, he thought. The colour of ash…

But there were colours here, he realized suddenly.

He stopped and looked around more carefully.

If he looked in the direction of the sun, the ground looked a pale, golden brown. It was the same if he looked away from the sun, beyond his own long shadow. But to left or right the colours got darker, to a richer deep brown. If he looked under his feet, or at a handful of soil in his hand, the colour was a deep charcoal grey, sometimes even a black.

But anyhow the Moon colours looked pale and lifeless when he looked at the blue armbands on his suit, his blue lunar overshoes, the brilliant black and gold and silver of the Shoemaker, and especially the ice-blue of the Earth, when he looked up.

He knew he would have to learn to take account of all this, learn to read the landscape on its own terms, in its own conditions of light and shadow.

He did a little geologizing.

He was standing on a dark plain, its surface evidently sculpted by craters, of all dimensions, craters on craters. There were rolling hills, almost like dunes, their form softened and fluid, their flanks littered with boulders thrown out of the larger craters. And close by he could make out smaller craters, almost rimless pits in the soil, and the centre of each one was marked by a spot of fused glass, a remnant of the punch which had dug out that particular pit.

It was a landscape unlike any he had seen on Earth.

The mountains — foothills of the Aristarchus crater rim walls — rose up like topped-off pyramids into the black sky, their sides dauntingly steep. There was no easy comparison with terrestrial features; the hills were neither as crag sharp as the granite of the Rockies, nor as smoothly rounded as the ice rivers of Norway.

And besides, almost all of Earth’s features — certainly all of the mountains — were young, at any rate by comparison with what he would find on the Moon. Some of the mountains of the Moon were almost as old as the Solar System itself.

But the shadows of the mountains were not the wells of darkness he had expected, for light, reflected from nearby slopes and plains, softened the shadows. The light, reflected from the rocky ground, was, of course, Moonlight: precisely that, the very light which illuminated Earth’s night sky.

He’d ridden through Moonlight across a quarter of a million miles. And now, standing here, he and Geena were bathed in it.

He shivered.

He took a step forward, over dust and broken rock. The Moon gave him a firm footing, beneath a layer of looser dust that compressed like unpacked snow.

The loose stuff varied from place to place, from maybe a few inches thick to perhaps a foot. He knew the reason for that: the regolith was created by a hail of micrometeorite bombardment, and it deepened and matured with time.

So when he walked into a patch of softer dust, he was walking somewhere older.

Anyhow, nowhere did it cause him a problem; the Moon, as a geological field site, would, it seemed, be an accommodating place to work.

In fact, he felt an odd ache as he looked down at the dust billowing around his feet. He wanted to take off his gloves and run his bare fingers through the soil, connecting with the Moon. But that was, of course, impossible; he was the alien here, encased in his bubble of Earth murk, and he must stay that way.

He walked further.

He bent and, with both hands, pulled a big rock out of the ground. He had to push his fingers into the crackling surface, smashing up agglutinates, rock fragments glued together by solar wind particles, to get his hands around the rock.

From above the rock looked smooth, almost flat against the ground, like a glacier deposit. But when he dug it out he found its underside, buried in the regolith, was sharp and angular, and maybe ten times as bulky as the portion that had shown above ground, like an iceberg. And the buried surfaces were sheer, lacking the sheen of zap pits and impact glass of the exposed section.

This rock, casually dropped here after some ancient impact, had been eroded flat by an aeon of micrometeorite rain.

He brushed off the dust and held the rock up to his faceplate.

This was a breccia, a compound lump of rock whose fragments had been crushed, ground, melted, mixed and then bound together in a shock melt. When he turned it in the flat sunlight he could see the sparkle of glass, the recrystallized minerals that were holding this lump together.

This rock, in fact, almost looked like a vesicular basalt — a pumice, riddled with bubbles left by gas. But the heat that formed it came not from volcanism but from the energy of the catastrophic fall of a giant impactor. And he thought he could see that this breccia was in fact itself made up of earlier breccias, breccias nested in breccias like biblical generations, remnants of still earlier impacts. In this one chunk there might be pieces of ancient anorthosite crust, mare lavas, even solidified dregs of the original magma ocean.

He weighed the lump of breccia in his gloved hand. Its weight was barely discernible in the feeble gravity. And yet, just looking at it, he felt echoes of the almost inconceivable violence which had shaped the Moon’s early history, sensed the processes which had formed this rock since, processes unlike any on Earth.

And now Geena was calling him, telling him to come with her to the Apollo site.

He put the rock back where he had found it, back where it had lain for a billion years, and loped away through the morning sunlight.

Side by side, Geena and Henry crossed the few hundred yards to the Apollo site. They kept quiet, concentrating on learning how to walk.

Walking, in fact, took more of his attention than he expected, distracting him from the geology.

His suit would have been too heavy for him even to lift on Earth. And, being pressurized, it was about as stiff as a rubber tyre. But because of the low gravity, his mobility wasn’t much reduced from what he could manage on Earth.

He found that trying to walk heel-to-toe, as he did on Earth, was difficult and seemed to eat up energy. He kept tumbling away from the surface, as if he was walking across a trampoline; he didn’t feel as if he was stuck down properly to this light little world, and his overpowered Earth muscles kept throwing him off.

The best way to move was something like a lope. He would push off with one foot, shift his weight, and land on the other foot. It seemed to him he was covering ten feet or more with every step. But that couldn’t be right; the Moon must be fooling him again.

However far it was, however long he was up, every step kept him off the ground for several heartbeats, and he had to watch where he came down, on a rock or in an ankle-snapping crater. The trick was to anticipate each next step as he flew across the ground, shifting his weight and pushing off as soon as he landed, working rhythmically, like loping across a stream. It was demanding, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the ground for long. But he could relax in mid-step, unlike a runner on Earth, and it was amazing how that simple thing conserved his energy. It seemed to him he would take a long, long time to get tired.

He could sense his inertia, though.

It was hard to get moving; he had to thrust his body forward to get underway, as if he was walking into a wind. And to stop, he had to dig in his heels and lean back. He felt as if he was scuffing at this pulverized surface to which he was lightly bonded, trying to move his massive Earth bulk.

It was the separation of mass and inertia; the gravity here was so weak the effects of his mass were reduced, and inertia dominated. Sir Isaac Newton, you should have been up here. You understood all this, without having to fly to the Moon.

When he got tired, the stiffness of his suit actually helped. He could stop where he was and just slump inside his suit, and if he gave up the effort of trying to move the damn thing he could just rest against it.

When he looked across to Geena, she was loping along in much the same way. With her body dipping, stiff-legged, at every stride, she looked like a giraffe running across some Godforsaken piece of veldt, dipping into the swelling crater pits. He stifled a laugh.

…The surface was nothing but craters. Emphasize that: nothing but craters.

The main craters ranged in size, mostly from a foot across to maybe twenty yards, and from a few inches to maybe ten yards deep. It was like the frozen surface of some ocean, shaped by wavelike swells of a characteristic length and spacing.

But there were smaller pits as well, right down to zap pits on every rock he picked up, and he knew that if he took a glass to the fragments of regolith he’d find more craters right down to the limits of visibility, the rocks themselves like little Moons, as if this was a fractal landscape.

After four billion years of incessant pounding, there wasn’t a square inch that hadn’t been pulverized and racked up into a saucer-shaped dip of one size or another, not a footfall but where he crunched on regolith, a flour of pulverized rock. The terrain was just saturated, like the desiccated remnant of some Civil War battlefield.

He focused on the experience: the soapy feel of the fresh regolith, the gentle swell of the surface. As he loped across the land he might as well have been on the surface of some ocean, rolling quietly.

…And at Aristarchus Base, Rover tracks and footprints converged on the truncated base of the abandoned Lunar Module. The LM formed the centre of a circle of scuffed regolith, littered with gear.

Geena walked respectfully up to the old LM. It was a squat box on legs, a little taller than she was. There was a ladder fixed to the front leg; when she ran a gloved hand over it she found dust clinging to its rungs, left by departing feet, more than thirty years ago.

The gold-coloured Kevlar insulation on the descent stage was discoloured, and in some places it had split open and peeled back. Geena tried to smooth it back with her gloved hand, but it just crumbled under her touch. The bird was evidently thoroughly irradiated. The paint had turned to tan, and where she looked more closely she could see tiny micrometeorite pits, little craters dug into the paintwork. Another million years of this erosion and there would be nothing left of the Apollo.

She looked for Henry. He was studying the ALSEP science station that the astronauts had set up. She loped over to join him.

The instruments were laid out in a star-shape over an inert patch of the Moon, and connected by gold-coloured cabling to a central telemetry transmitter and a power plant — a thermoelectric nuclear generator, now long inert. Henry pointed out the sights like a tourist guide. Here was the seismometer, like a paint can on top of a silver drop cloth. This irregular ball in a squat box on legs must be the solar wind spectrometer. Three booms, spread out like the petals of a flower, made up the lunar surface magnetometer. And so on. All the instruments were boxes covered by gold-coloured insulation and white paint, covered with dust from long-gone astronaut footsteps, now blistered by years of sunlight.

There were packing brackets everywhere, dumped on the closely trodden ground.

When she turned away, she tripped on an ALSEP cable.

She didn’t even know it; Henry had to tell her. She couldn’t see her own feet as she walked, because of the chest-mounted control unit in her way, and she couldn’t even feel the cable through the inflated layers of her suit. The cable itself hadn’t unrolled properly. It seemed to have kept a kind of “memory” of being rolled, and once unrolled it wouldn’t lie flat, in one-sixth G.

Near the LM was much evidence of departure. The surface was littered by exhausted lithium hydroxide canisters and LM armrests, two abandoned backpacks, urine bags and food packs: garbage thrown out of the LM, the detritus of three brief days of exploration.

And the LM was surrounded by glittering fragments, for its foil insulation had been split and scattered by the blast of the departed ascent stage’s engine. There was a new ray system, streaks of dust which overlay the footprints.

On a rise three hundred feet away sat the Lunar Rover, with its camera blindly pointing to a sky into which its masters had disappeared.

Perhaps fifty yards from the LM, a US flag stood on its pole, held stiffly out on the windless Moon by a piece of wire. It had fluttered only once, as the brief blast of the LM’s ascent stage engine had rushed over it, and now it was tipped over, at an angle of thirty or forty degrees to the vertical.

Geena loped over to the flag.

She got hold of the staff, raised it straight, and tried to push it into the regolith. The staff would go in four or five inches easily, but then she came up against stiff resistance. Still, she managed to balance it, almost upright.

The relentless beating of sunlight had worn away at the fabric, and its colours — the red stripes, the blue star field — were no longer factory-bright. But the flag was the most colourful object on the Moon.

When she turned away from the flag, she saw a pattern in the dust. In the low sunlight she couldn’t make out what it was, and she walked around it.

A single line of footsteps led to this patch in the regolith, then turned back. And here was the object of that minor expedition: a name, written in the lunar dust, by a gloved finger. TRACY. A name written up here so it would last forever, on the unchanging lunar surface. He — Jays or Tom — had thought nobody would ever see this.

She shivered. Maybe it was a feeling she was walking through a graveyard. Or maybe it was exultation. After all, she was here. We can still do it, by God. We got here, just like before.

She turned, taking care not to spray dust over the scrawled name, and walked away.

The second Shoemaker, with their supplies, had come down clumsily. One of its four legs had settled into a nasty pit of a crater, and the whole thing was tilted at maybe ten degrees to the horizontal. But when Geena hopped up to the platform to check its systems, it looked otherwise intact.

The Shoemaker looked identical to their own, except that its upper surface was covered with a glittering Kevlar insulation blanket. Geena pulled that away; it fell oddly — low gravity, no air — it was stiff as moulded steel until it hit the ground, where it crumpled softly.

There were no crew standing frames here, Henry saw. Instead there was a pair of big, clam-shaped discs, maybe two yards across, pressed up against each other, with some kind of fabric compressed between them. There were equipment boxes and fuel tanks crowded around, black and white and gold.

Geena started to undo restraints on the boxes. “Help me,” she said. “We have to unload all of these.”

Clumsily, Henry hopped onto the platform, and bent to help her.

So, here he was, working on the Moon. It was harder than he expected. His Space Shuttle inner-tube suit was unbearably stiff at the waist and knees, and it took a lot of perseverance to lean over and bend. And the stiffness of his gloves made it hard to close a grip; he had to fight a monkey impulse to pull his gloves off and use his bare hands.

When he picked up a box, because he couldn’t bend his suit, he had to hold it out in front of him. That meant he was constantly fighting his suit, like a weight-training exercise. Like that, he tired quickly, and had to take frequent rests.

The gravity was a sixth of Earth’s, but, oddly, when he hefted something heavy, it felt less than that — maybe a tenth. And when he got something moving, it just kept on going, but the motions were slow.

At that, Geena was making better progress.

“I don’t remember you as a fitness freak,” he said.

She grunted as she worked. “In space the hard work is done not by your legs, like on Earth, but by your arms and hands, which have to do all the work of hauling your mass around, gripping things, moving equipment. So in between missions I did a lot of upper body training.”

Henry could hear his breath rattling in his bubble helmet, his pulse pounding in his ears. “Smartass.”

At length they had the Shoemaker unloaded, their equipment scattered around. By now their Moon suits were coated with gritty charcoal-coloured dust, up to and beyond their knees.

“Now for the fun part,” Geena said. She reached up to the nearer of the clam-dishes and pulled a lanyard.

Latches popped open all around the clam-dish, which released its twin. The concertina-style fabric contained inside filled out to a cylinder. The clam-dishes moved apart, wobbling slightly, in utter silence.

When the habitat was fully opened it made up a rough cylinder maybe three yards long, sitting like a pale fat worm on the Shoemaker stage. It had a big US flag and the NASA roundel etched into its side.

Henry grinned. A typical NASA gadget. “Woah,” he said. “The world’s biggest squeezebox.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

“Another prototype?”

“You got it. Home sweet home. Here.” She handed him an equipment box. “Now we got to get all this stuff inside.”

He took the box, and turned to the hab.

They squeezed through the tight fabric hatch in their Moon suits, like two soot-covered bugs trying to get back into their chrysalises. Geena pushed buttons, and air hissed into the shelter. The Moon dust which had stuck to their clothing with such determination sprang away, filling the new air with a greyish cloud. The dust scattered over equipment boxes and the fabric walls of the hab. Henry hated to get Moon dirt all over everything, but there really wasn’t a choice.

His polarizing microscope, in its battered wooden box, looked utterly out of place here, a jarring piece of familiarity in this alien place, as comforting as he’d expected.

Geena got to work setting up an oxygen generator. Adapted from Space Station kit, it was a Russian design, a cylinder four feet long which worked by separating water into oxygen and hydrogen.

When Henry uncracked his helmet, he could smell the dust. It smelled like gunpowder.

It made Henry sneeze.

The dust in this shelter had never before been exposed to oxygen. So every grain was chemically active, like gunpowder just after it had been set off, and it was busily oxidizing, rusting away, not to mention reacting with his nasal passages.

Geena took her helmet off. Her short hair was plastered to her forehead.

They sat for a moment, breathing hard, facing each other, huge and clumsy in their pressure suits.

It was — awkward. Eight years of marriage, and here they were on the damn Moon, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Looking into Geena’s ice blue eyes, he sensed she felt the same.

They got on with their chores, and their conversation stuck to the equipment.

They took off their gloves and helmets. Then, helping each other, each in turn stepped into a big stowage bag and pulled it up, and began to dismantle and shuck out of the suits. The stowage bag was needed to catch the rain of sooty Moon dust.

The hab module seemed smaller than it had looked from the outside, and it was tipped up by the Shoemaker’s awkward landing. There was only just room for a suited human to stand upright. Every time Henry rolled against the fabric wall the whole thing shook like a kid’s inflatable bouncer; he just hated the thought that this was all that stood between him and the high-grade vacuum outside.

They piled up their opened-out suits in a corner of the shelter. They would have to leave them to dry out before they would be usable again. The pressure suits, irradiated by the sun, smelled of ozone. And Henry found his faceplate was scarred, in several places. Tiny zap pits, from the invisible interplanetary sleet within which he’d been walking, micrometeorites labouring to wear away his protection. If he stayed out there long enough, he supposed, the hail of dust would wear him down, grind up his suit and flesh and bones, leaving nothing of him but a strange organic trace in the thick regolith layers, a part of the eroded-flat Moon.

Out of his suit for the first time since leaving lunar orbit, he inspected his own damage. His face, armpits, chest and crotch were pooled with sweat. The sweat didn’t drip down, as it did on Earth, but clung in place; he could scrape it off with his fingers but it stuck there too, wobbling like a viscous jellyfish.

His hands and forearms ached, and his fingers were sore — he even found blood underneath the nails of his right hand — and his wrists had been bruised where they bumped up against the seal rings on his suit.

By comparison, his hips and knees felt stiff from under-use; it was a pleasure to do a little stretching, to touch his toes and squat down, bending his knees, to flex his body in ways his encasing pressure suit never allowed. There was no doubt, though, that Geena was right; the Moon was a world for the hands and arms and upper body.

Geena opened a spigot on one of the boxes, and poured water into a shallow bowl. “Here. Wash. But go easy.”

The water poured slowly, and curled gracefully against the side of the bowl, licking upward in a slow tide, as if trying to escape.

Henry dipped his hands in. The meniscus bowed, reluctant to wet him. Geena had a little vial of liquid soap, and when he added that the water ran more easily over his hands. When he lifted his hands out of the water the liquid clung to his skin in a sheath maybe a half-inch thick. He held his hands over the bowl, and the water dripped back in fat globules.

The languid motion of the water was surprisingly pleasing, easy on the eye muscles. As if, he thought, this was the pace our systems were supposed to work at all along.

They pulled on blue Space Shuttle flight suits.

Geena showed him the hab’s systems. The life support was open-loop. There was no attempt to recycle any of it. The hab could support the two of them, Geena said, for maybe six days. The atmosphere in here was low-pressure oxygen; there were filter beds to take out carbon dioxide, which they would have to reload.

The power came from hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, built into the Shoemaker, which would also supply more water. Their waste would go into bags or tanks, to be dumped over the side when it was time to leave. There were cold plates and radiators to control the temperature. There was a simple medical kit, germicidal wipes, some tools, equipment for the EVAs.

Cramped, dusty, fabric walls, tipped-up, crowded with gear: the hab was, he thought, like a tent in the Antarctic. Except for the two huge space helmets stacked in the corner.

Geena started to dig out food.

“Station rations,” she said. “In fact just the rehydratable stuff. You can add hot water, but we don’t have an oven.”

Henry looked at the rows of labelled plastic bags in dismay. “Fit for a king. Okay, what do you recommend?”

She dug out two packets. “Chicken, cashew nuts, rice.”

“Ah. You always preferred Chinese.”

“Henry, for Christ’s sake.”

“Sorry.”

“The hot spigot is over there.”

“Right.”

He found how to inject the bags with water, and knead them up until they were mushy. Geena slit open the bags with a pocket knife, and dumped the contents into bowls. Then she dug again into the food locker and produced chopsticks.

“Wow,” Henry said. “You think of everything.”

“Just something I always wanted to try.”

In one-sixth G, the chopsticks worked better than on Earth; the food seemed to fly in a steady stream to Henry’s mouth, and with pretty good accuracy. But the portion lasted just minutes, and as for the flavour, he had the feeling he should have eaten the plastic packet.

The walls of the hab were vaguely translucent. It was, of course, still lunar morning outside. As he ate, Henry was aware of the gross features of the landscape: the sun a dazzling, blurred disc, black sky, bright ground.

Geena seemed to be trying to come up with something to say, to fill the silence. “You know, the Chinese have a Moon legend. They say a beautiful girl called Chango has been living up here for four thousand years. She was sent up here because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. And she has a companion, a big Chinese rabbit which—”

“What if we get punctured by a meteorite?”

“You know that’s not likely.”

He punched the walls with his fist, making the fabric wobble around them. “Okay. But what about cosmic radiation?”

“Actually, the biggest risk on a six-day stay is a solar flare.”

“So where is the six-inch shell of lead plate to protect us?”

“You can’t design out all the risk, Henry. And the risk of dying because of some act of God up here is low compared to some of the other risks we have to take.”

“Such as?”

“Principally, launch from Earth. Reentry is no Disneyland ride, either.”

“So tell me how you handle this low risk.”

“Management waivers. A NASA speciality. You want some dried strawberries?”

After they’d cleaned up, they did some work on their suits. They turned away from each other, seeking a little privacy.

…The cabin was still full of Moon dust. Henry could actually see it in the air, hanging like a fine grey mist. If he breathed in deep it scratched at his throat and hurt his chest.

It was very clingy stuff. It got all over his hands. It stuck to everything: metal, fabric, painted surfaces, clothes and skin. The stuff had low conductivity and dielectric losses, and it had been pounded incessantly by ultraviolet from the sun, and so it had built up a charge. It stuck to him electrostatically, the way he had once, as a kid, made pieces of paper stick to his comb.

But knowing the process didn’t make it any less of a pest.

He worked on his suit. He tried a pocket-sized whisk broom to scrub the dust off of his suit. But it only seemed to work the dust deeper into the fabric.

The dust itself was very fine. It was basically ground-up lava bedrock, which made it abrasive as all hell. There were probably shards of pure iron, and perhaps glassy spheres and dumbbells in here, produced by major impacts, droplets which had been thrown into space and fallen back. And he could see the soil contained larger fragments: agglutinates, particles welded together by the glass produced by the much smaller impacts of micrometeorites.

Out on the surface, the regolith matured, subtly, the rain of micrometeorites welding it into such agglutinates, the solar wind implanting volatiles — hydrogen, for example — into the surface. Maybe recoverable, by future colonists.

He could feel the glass pricking at his fingers. And, as he rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, it was working his way into his skin, he saw. It seemed to be smoothing out his fingertips, taking away his individuality under a surface of lunar debris. He suspected it would take a long time, a lot of washing, before he could get himself clean of this stuff.

He started greasing his suit’s zippers and neck and wrist ring seals.

The toilet was waste tubes and plastic bags. Embarrassing intimacy.

When it was time to sleep, they slung fire-proof Beta-cloth hammocks across the shelter, one over the other. Henry elected for the bottom bunk.

Geena gave him a sleeping bag, and a length of hose.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Pump your bag full of water.”

“Are you crazy?… Oh. So this is NASA’s plan for protecting us from radiation.”

“You got it.” She dumped her own sleeping bag onto her bunk, and ran a tube from the water tank. When her bag lining was full she hung a blanket over the sun’s blurred image, darkening the hab, and clambered into her bunk.

Henry climbed inside his own bag and tried to lie down. It was like settling into a wraparound water bed. Every time Geena moved, she gurgled; and, he supposed, so did he.

Just above him, Geena barely made a dent in her own hammock, but he could see the curve of her hips, the way she’d tucked her legs up a little way towards her stomach, just like she always used to.

He tried to sleep.

The shelter was full of noise, the bangs and whirs of coolant pumps and ventilation machinery.

He’d read that the old Apollo guys had trained for sleeping on the Moon by camping out in Lunar Module simulators, with a tape of LM noises playing in the background. They should have just slept in a boiler room, he thought.

…There was a creak. He had a sense of falling.

His eyes snapped open.

“Geena,” he hissed. “Are you awake?”

Geena’s voice was hushed. “Hell, yes, I’m awake.”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hell, yes, I heard it.”

“Do you think we’re tipping?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t suppose this damn thing is going to roll over altogether?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“No. I can’t tell for sure which way is up. This low gravity—”

“Henry.”

“What?”

“Why are we whispering?”

Henry pushed his way out of his hammock. He collided softly with Geena, who came tumbling down from the top bunk; he held onto her upper arms, to keep them both from falling over.

For a moment they stood there like that, in the milky gloom of the shelter. Geena’s face was only a few inches from his, outlined by the subdued stand-by lighting. Her eyes were pools of darkness, her mouth a shadow. But her breath was warm on his face, the heat of her flesh in his hands tangible; for the first time he realized how deeply, utterly cold he had felt, how much he needed to be held by another human being.

They were, after all, alone on the Moon, the only living creatures on a planet.

She said, “You feel horny, don’t you?”

He grunted. “I haven’t felt so horny since my father’s funeral. But—”

“But it wouldn’t be wise,” she said.

“Damn right it wouldn’t,” he said; and when he looked into her eyes, he saw they both meant it.

They stepped apart. She began to cast around, in the piles of equipment loosely stacked on the floor.

“What are you looking for?”

“A weight.”

“What for?”

“A plumb line. If we can’t tell which way is up we need an attitude reference. We don’t have an eight-ball in here.”

She dug out one of Henry’s smaller geology hammers, and tied a piece of string to it. When she hung it up from a loop in the roof of the shelter, it hung straight down.

“So we aren’t tipping,” Henry said.

“No. That damn thing knows which way is up, even if we can’t tell.”

“Yeah.”

She reached up and, with an easy low-G bound, pulled herself up into her hammock once more. “Good night, Henry.”

“Yeah.” He clambered back into his own hammock, and pulled his sleeping bag up around his neck.

He tried to settle his mind.

He listened to Geena’s soft, even breath. When he thought he was tipping, he looked up, and he could see the hammer dangling there, calm and rational, a link to a world where the laws of physics continued to work.

He closed his eyes, determined to sleep.

To his surprise, he succeeded.

2

Alone in lunar orbit, Arkady set his alarm to wake him during a period when he was on the far side of the Moon: invisible to all mankind, to remote blue Earth, even to the two humans scrambling through the Moon dirt near Aristarchus, here he could enjoy the ultimate privacy.

He lay for a moment in his sleeping bag. He was surrounded by equipment, bags and containers and documents, fixed to every square centimetre of wall surface. It was like being in the middle of a busy railroad station, he mused, luggage scattered everywhere.

The craft’s noise was a miniature orchestra: the whirring of different electrical devices, fans, regenerators, carbon dioxide absorbers and dust filters, gadgets which were never switched off. The noise rattled around him, echoing in this compact metal barrel. It was, he supposed, about as noisy as a busy apartment — with one difference: these were only mechanical sounds; there were no human voices here, save his own.

Once, for an experiment, on the far side of the Moon, he’d turned everything off. Just for a moment. The silence was oppressive: in his ears there was only the susurrus of his own breath, his rushing blood, and beyond that a stillness that stretched a quarter-million miles. It gave him an unwelcome sense of perspective: noise seemed to make the universe more friendly.

Loose objects — pens, paper, food wrappers — swam through the air past his head. They moved languidly in the gentle air currents from the fans, sometimes darting this way and that in the random flow of the air, like improbable fish.

Here, everything floated: dust, pieces of trash, food crumbs, juice drops, coffee, tea. None of it would settle out, and all of it ended up suspended in the air. This enhanced Soyuz was fitted with a jury-rigged air circulation system, and a lot of stuff would end up collected on the intake grille of fan ducts, which he kept covered with cheese cloth. Once a day, he would wrap up the cheese cloth with its assorted trash and replace it with a fresh one.

Most things, if he lost them, ended up on the grille. If he needed something in a hurry he had a little rubber balloon that he kept in his coverall pocket. If he blew this up and released it, it would drift with the prevailing air currents and he could just follow where it went.

If he was thinking about chores, it was time to get up.

He clambered out of his sleeping bag. He started his day with bread, salt and water.

He spent some time cleaning up the Soyuz.

He had some napkins soaked with katamine, a scouring detergent. He wiped down the wall panels, the hand-rails, the door hatches, the control panel surfaces, the crew couches. And, with a little hand-held vacuum, he cleaned all the tough places where dirt built up. He opened up wall panels so he could vacuum the bundles of pipes, cables, fan grilles and heat-exchanger ducts there. When he did that he found a pen he’d lost right after the launch; he tucked it in his pocket, unreasonably pleased at this little triumph.

He had grown used to life in microgravity.

When he’d first arrived on Mir, he remembered, he could barely move a metre without catching his feet on side panels and banging his legs on anything fixed there: documents, cameras, lenses, control panels. Now he could fly through hatches and compartments, wriggling like some lanky fish, neatly avoiding the equipment and obstructions. If he had to cross some space without handholds, he had learned how hard he had to push. When he had to maintain a position at some work station, he had learned to find a post around which to wrap his legs, or else he would find somewhere to lodge his elbows, feet, knees or even his head, thus holding himself steady; sometimes he would use his legs as clamps, to hold maps or other documentation.

He had come to depend heavily on the advice and experience of other cosmonauts who, for nearly thirty years now, had been learning to survive long-duration assignments in space.

There had been that time, for instance, when the Progress resupply ship was late and he and his crewmates had been reduced to burning lithium perchlorate candles to sustain their oxygen. And then the recycling plant that connected to the toilet had failed, and the sewage tanks had filled up. The crew had been forced to open up the tanks and simply stir the sewage, to reduce the volume. That had worked, but the stench had been awful and did not seem to dissipate, as the days wore on; after all, they could not open a window up there to let in fresh air.

Still, there had been some comedy as their American guest, brought up there in air-conditioned comfort on Shuttle, had tried to cope with all this; she had looked on with horror as the sewage tank was opened, antiseptic wipes over her face to protect her from week-old Russian shit — or, as she had comically put it, “human post-nutritive substance’…

There were two e-mails for him today, transferred up via Houston to the IBM laptop fixed to one wall by Velcro patches. The first mail was relayed from Korolyov. It seemed his coefficient of errors was up to point three five, an unacceptably high level by historic standards.

Arkady sighed and discarded the mail. It was a peculiarity of the Russian system — seen by Geena’s American eyes at least — that every error he made, on this or any other mission, was recorded by his controllers on the ground. Basically, after a mission, he was evaluated not by what he did or how much he accomplished, but by how many mistakes he made.

If he saved the world, he thought wryly, maybe they would overlook his unsatisfactory error ratio.

The second mail was more pleasing. It was from workers at the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station in Siberia. One summer, as a student of the Moscow Institute of Aviation, Arkady had worked at Krasnoyarsk on a dam construction project.

› To celebrate the first Russian lunar flight, by the joint decision of the workers and the MIA student construction workers in Sayany, Arkady Berezovoy is nominated as an Honorary Concrete Worker in Dmitri Syroyezkho’s work team. His salary will be transferred to the Russian Peace Foundation. We wish you Siberian health, happiness, successful completion of your mission, and a safe return to Earth. We embrace you as a friend. Come and visit us in Sayany…

Arkady was moved. He was sorry Geena was not here to see this — though he was glad her American ex-husband Henry was not here to mock. Americans would never understand such a gesture as this, and would deride it.

But to Arkady, it was like an echo of the past. It seemed to Arkady that since the implosion of the Soviet Union — whatever the rights or wrongs of that “liberation” — the Russian people had had precious few heroes to celebrate. This message from the power workers wasn’t the first such he had received. It warmed him, here orbiting the cold wastes of the Moon, to think that his countrymen, even in these dark times, were following his mission. Arkady had always believed that the true value of a hero was not to himself or herself, but to others, as an example of the heights to which humanity can aspire.

He drifted before the laptop keyboard, and composed a reply.

› Dear friends, I thank you for your mail, and for the great honour you do me… I can assure you that by my hard work on the Soyuz I will represent the hydroconstruction workers with honour…

That done, the Honorary Concrete Worker continued with his duties, in lunar orbit.

When he passed over Aristarchus, he looked for Geena and Henry. If Arkady told the computer where to look, it was able to point the navigation sextant, with its low-power telescope, right at the rille; and when he looked in the eyepiece, just within the rim of the crater, there was the lander: a point of metallic light trailing a needlelike shadow.

He peered into the eyepiece, willing himself to pick out more details. Maybe he could make out the four landing legs of the old Apollo Lunar Module… Perhaps that fuzzy oblong was Geena’s inflatable shelter.

But the “scope wasn’t powerful enough for that, and he was starting to see what he wanted to see, not what was there; and so, he knew, he must put aside the telescope.

No Russian had ever visited the surface of the Moon. Perhaps no Russian ever would. It was an exercise in futility, therefore, to gaze on its surface like Moses at the Promised Land.

It might have been different, though.

Arkady would, he admitted to himself, relish the chance to be a hero, to be another Gagarin to inspire future generations, to help his country climb its long ladder to a better future.

But he would do nothing to jeopardize the mission.

He sailed once more into silence.

He liked this experience, sailing through lunar orbit, of being alone on the far side of the Moon. To a pilot it was the essence of flying: to be alone, in control of your craft. As he was now. It was, he thought, the purest form of freedom.

And there were lonelier places than the far side of the Moon. He had flown sorties over Afghanistan; he knew; he had been there.

When he came into view of Earth, the radio static turned to voices, and he was connected to humanity once more, strained voices which betrayed the grimness of the planet.

3

Houston woke them up with a burst of Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World.

Henry snapped awake, disconcerted. He’d woken up to news — bad news — every day for three months before the mission. But then it wasn’t NASA policy to pass on news, bad or otherwise, even when the world was coming to pieces around them.

For a while they lay in their bunks, staring at fabric walls illuminated by tan backlight from the Moon dust.

Good God, Henry thought. It’s real. I’m still on the Moon.

He’d slept well. He felt good.

Even the soreness in his arms had disappeared. The doctors on the ground had speculated that the cardiovascular system was so much more efficient, here in one-sixth G, that it cleansed the muscles of lactic acid and other waste products before they had a chance to do any damage. He hadn’t believed them; but now, he could feel the results.

How strange, he thought, that humans, four-limbed primates, should be so well-adapted to conditions on this sister planet. It looked as if those millions of years spent swinging around tree branches hadn’t been for nothing after all.

In the end, how easy it had been to come back to the Moon. They’d just decided they wanted to do it, and they’d done it. We wasted thirty years of exploration time, he thought.

But then Geena started to move, and it was time to begin the day.

A day in which, he realized, he was going to have to confront the Moonseed at last.

He struggled out of his sleeping bag.

When Henry peered out of the shelter’s little window, the Moon looked strange.

He knew from yesterday how far away the various instruments and craft of the Apollo astronauts were. He could even see the tracks of his own prints in the scuffed regolith. But when he looked out of the shelter’s window, it looked as if the instruments were right outside, as if they had come huddling closer to the shelter’s warmth.

None of it, the swimming perspective of the Moon, made any sense to him.

He turned to his suit and donned it, working steadily through its checklist.

When they were done they decompressed the shelter and climbed out, one by one, like fat grey-white grubs pushing out of a discarded shell.

He felt as if he was in some immense darkened room, where the light didn’t quite reach the walls, so that he was suspended in a patch of light in the middle of a darkened floor.

A morning that lasts a week. They’d first landed at something like 6:30 a.m., local time. The twelve hours they’d spent inside the shelter were equivalent to something like a half-hour in the lunar “day’: enough to shrink the shadows a little, but not by much.

Even so, all the pooled shadows were different, changing the feel of the landscape. Even the colours had changed, Henry saw, because the colours depended on the angle to the sunlight; the greys and browns, changing as he looked around, seemed to him a little more vivid.

He kept thinking he saw features, rocks and craters, he hadn’t noticed yesterday; but he soon realized they were the same rocks under different lighting, like a movie set that had been reassembled. The slopes of the crater walls and ejecta hills looked much less severe, almost gentle: not nearly the challenge they’d appeared yesterday. Maybe that was true. Maybe he was being fooled in the other direction.

The Moon was full of optical illusions, he thought. Given there was nothing here but bare rocks and flat sunlight, that was kind of surprising. It was a stage set put together by a master illusionist, a minimalist.

Maybe, he thought moodily, the Moon really is a magic world, a world of dream or nightmare, a world where distances and times can shift and swim, like a relativity student’s fever dream.

The Moon was, undoubtedly, a stranger and more interesting place than he expected.

He started to collect the equipment they would need for the day: tools and a couple of batteries for the Rover, his geological gear.

Reaching to lift a bag, he leaned too far, and fell.

When the fall began, his balance was lost quickly, especially when he tried to back up. The ground was uneven everywhere, and he kept treading on rocks and crater holes that made him stumble further. Besides, the heavy pack at his back gave him a centre of gravity aft of his midline, so he was always being pulled backwards.

But he fell with a dreamy slowness, like falling underwater. He had time to twist around, the stiff suit making him move as a unit, like a statue, and he could catch his footing before he fell. He just spun around, bent his knees and recovered, scuffing his feet to get them under him again.

Then he felt his ears pop.

He had to be losing pressure. He felt his heart pounding. Maybe he should call Geena.

He stood still. He leaned forward and checked the gauge on his chest. There was no change, and he didn’t feel any difference. Just that one pop.

Maybe he had bumped against the oxygen inflow port, or the outflow. If he obstructed the flow, that would cause a momentary transient; it might even have been a slight increase in pressure.

His monitors stayed stable. A glitch, then.

The incident was enough to brush him with fear.

Sobered, he went to work.

Side by side, carrying tools and equipment, they walked away from the Shoemaker, towards the Rover.

The Apollo Lunar Rover was a home-workshop beach buggy: about the size of a low-slung jeep, but with no body, or windshield, or engine.

“Oh, shit,” Henry said. “Have we really got to ride this thing?”

“Better than walking. You know what the Apollo guys called it?”

“Hit me.”

“Chitty Chitty Boeing Boeing.”

They bounced around the Rover, inspecting it.

The Rover was an aluminum frame, ten feet long, maybe six wide. It had four fat wheels — actually not quite wheels, but wire mesh tyres, with metal chevrons for tread. There were fenders, of orange fibreglass. There were two bucket seats with plastic webbing, and a minimal controller — just a gearshift-like hand controller between the seats, and a display console the size of a small TV. No steering wheel. At the back of the buggy there were bags for storage of equipment and samples.

The front of the thing was cluttered up with cameras and comms equipment. The TV camera still pointed at the sky, where it had followed the final departure of the astronauts in their LM ascent stage. The camera was coated in insulation foil, which had split and cracked. The umbrella-shaped high-gain antenna still pointed at Earth, where the Apollo astronauts had left it, for the Earth had not moved in all the years since.

This Rover was a working vehicle. He could see how the straps on the backs of the frame chairs were stretched and displaced from use. There were still dusty footprints on the foot rests fitted to the ribbed frame, and the mark of a hand, imprinted in lunar dust, on the TV camera’s insulation. And one fender at the rear had cracked, and had been crudely patched with silver wire and what looked like a checklist cover, though the text and graphic had long since faded. The Rover looked as if it had been used just yesterday, as if its original drivers would come back in a couple hours for a fourth or fifth EVA.

Tracks, crisply ribbed, snaked off back over the ground, diminishing into the distance.

The Rovers had been built from scratch by Boeing in just two years. There had only ever been four of these babies, and all of them had been flown to the Moon, and all of them had been left up here, in the clean airless sunlight. Two million bucks apiece.

At that it was a better fate, he thought, than to finish up in a glass case in the Smithsonian or some NASA museum, slowly corroding in Earth’s thick, murky air while generations of successively more baffled tourists came to stand and gawk…

He said, “What makes you think this old dune buggy is going to work anyhow? It was built to last three days, not thirty years.”

She shrugged. “It was built for temperature extremes and vacuum. What is there to go wrong? Neighbourhood kids stealing the tyres? They built better than they had to, in those days. Look at those old space probes from the 1970s. Pioneer 10 lasted twenty-five years… Anyhow, you better hope. Otherwise, it will be a long walk.”

Geena left the original batteries in place at the back of the vehicle, and set replacements on top of them. The new batteries were an advanced lithium-ion design. She started to hook them up with jump cables, and Henry loped around to help her. It was stiff, clumsy work; the Rover hadn’t been designed for this sort of maintenance, and Henry’s fingers were soon aching as he fought the stiffness of his gloves to manipulate leads and crocodile clips.

They bolted a lightweight TV camera to the Rover’s big, clunky 1970s original, and a new miniaturized comms package. The old antenna still seemed to be serviceable, however. Then they loaded Henry’s gear into the panniers in back of the Rover.

When Henry moved past the camera, a red light glared at him, steady and relentless. Back on Earth, they were already watching him.

Let them. For what they were going to do today, there had been time to prepare no checklists, no simulations, no training. Maybe for the first time in the history of US space exploration — the first since John Glenn anyhow — he and Geena were, truly, heading into the unknown. And there wasn’t a damn thing any of those anal retentive characters at Mission Control could do to help or hinder them, except keep quiet.

Happily, they seemed to know it.

Henry lowered his butt cautiously onto the right-hand of the two bucket seats, and swivelled his legs over the corrugated frame. The pressure in his suit made it starfish, and he had to use a little force to keep his arms by his side. He pulled restraints around his chest and waist.

Half-sitting, half-lying, he tried to relax.

The Rover was noticeably light; when Geena dropped into the left-hand driver’s seat, the whole vehicle bounced, and little sprays of dust scattered around the wheels.

She flicked switches on the console, and dials lit up.

“Left-hand drive,” Henry said.

“What?”

“If the first people on the Moon had been Scottish, you’d be sitting where I am.”

She lifted her gold visor to stare at him.

Then she dropped her visor, put her right hand on the joystick control, and jammed the control forward.

The wheels, each spun by an independent electric motor, dragged at the dust. The Rover bucked like an aluminum bronco, bounding out of its thirty-year parking spot, throwing Henry against his straps.

Following Apollo tracks as fresh as if they had been laid down yesterday, they headed east, towards the rille.

It was an exciting ride.

The turns were sharp. Every time Geena steered, all four wheels swivelled. The ground here was all bumps and hollows, an artillery field of craters, and every time they hit an obstacle one or two wheels would come looming off of the ground.

Henry, strapped to his lawn chair on top of this thing, was thrown around, especially when Geena took a swerve to avoid a rock or a crater.

“Holy shit,” he said.

“Don’t be a baby,” Geena said. “It’s only eight miles an hour. We’d be beaten by a San Francisco cable car.”

“Yeah, but how many hummocks per hour are we hitting?”

Geena pushed up the speed. The Rover bounced high off the ground, and threw up huge rooster tails of black dust behind them.

“Let me explain something to you,” she said as she drove. “Our consumables are being used up all the time.”

“Sure.”

“So at no point are we going to drive further than our walkback limit.”

“Which is the distance we can walk back to the shelter, with the oxygen in our backpacks. In case the Rover breaks down. I know. That makes sense to me.”

“Yes. But because our consumables go down steadily, that walkback limit gets tighter and tighter with time. And we are going to stay within that limit, all the time.”

“Sure,” Henry said.

“If that means we have to leave the rille before you’re ready, we do it. If it means we have to miss out on interesting-looking detours, we do it.”

“Geena—”

“And I’m going to be conservative, because the navigation computer on this thing doesn’t work any more. As far as walkback is concerned I’m the boss.”

He shrugged, a clumsy gesture in his suit. “Sure. You’re the boss.”

If she wanted to feel in control, if that was her way of avoiding the funk she suffered on the way in, it was fine by him.

…There were, Henry realized afresh, craters everywhere.

Some of the craters were subdued depressions, almost rimless, as if dug out of loose sand. They were easy to traverse; the Rover just rolled down a gentle slope. But others — mostly smaller — were sharper, with well-defined rims, the classic cup shapes of story books. The younger craters were full of rubble, like builders” slag, concentrations of angular blocks, and they had littered rims. Geena had to drive around those babies.

They couldn’t avoid a big crater, maybe two hundred yards wide. As they approached the rim Geena slowed down; they had to thread their way through an apron of ejecta a couple of hundred yards deep, sharp-edged, scattered blocks up to four or five yards in size, dug out of the Moon and thrown up here.

From above, Henry knew, this blanket would form the crater’s ray system, the scattering of ejecta around the central wound, like a splash of blood around a bullet-hole. It gave him a thrill to know that he was here, actually driving among the rays of a lunar crater. A hell of a thing.

Here at last was the lip of the crater. They went over the rim into the basin. It was strewn with blocks ranging from a yard across to maybe fifteen yards, with a few yards separating the blocks, wide enough for them to drive through, as if passing through some miniature city block.

Crossing the crater floor there was an ejecta ridge, a rough, loose structure made of highland dust and mare basalt fragments, churned up together. It must be part of the ray system that came radiating away from the impact that created the younger Aristarchus. He noticed a piece of rock that sparkled with glass beads. It was possible that after the impact, so many billions of years ago, this chunk had been thrown thousands of miles into space, smashed, molten, cooling, before falling back to the Moon, to land here, and, after waiting as long as it had taken for life to evolve on the Earth, here it was for him to see.

Now they drove through a dune field — as he thought of it, in defiance of lunar geology — pitching over a uniformly corrugated ground, ridges and troughs. Here, he thought, was a place they could easily get lost. But the sun hung in the sky above them, unmoving, a beacon.

He thought about that. Morning would be a week long, on the Moon.

For seven days that sun was going to climb up the black sky. For seven days the shadows, of rocks and craters and two human beings, would shrink, vanishing at local noon. The rocks would get as hot as two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Then the sun would start to sink, sliding at last under the western horizon, and the two-week-long lunar night would cut in. The temperatures then would get down as far as two hundred degrees below zero.

Four hundred degree temperature swings, every month. On Earth, on a field trip in the desert, you could get swings of more than a hundred degrees, and at night you would sometimes hear distant, muffled crumps: rocks, exploding under the pressure of the endless contractions and expansions.

But there would be no shattering rocks here. Maybe there had been such incidents once, but every rock that was going to shed layers had done it a hundred million years ago, or more; and there was no volcanism to push up mountains and deliver fresh rocks to the air, no frost to work into rock cracks. After aeons of erosion the Moon was smooth. The mountains of Aristarchus, on the horizon, were like fluid sculptures, rounded and smooth, set out under the black sky, majestic in their own way. If he looked towards the sun’s glare, they were partly silhouetted, their forms delineated by smooth crescents of sunlit terrain, like sand dunes at dawn.

And the mountains weren’t grey or brown as he had expected, but a pale gold, in the low lunar morning light. Rounded, dust-covered, they reminded him of ski slopes — maybe in the mountains of Colorado, high above the timber line. And that golden sheen gave them a feeling of warmth, for him; they seemed to cup the Rover like an open hand.

He could, he realized, get to feel at home here. You could set down your lander almost anywhere on the Moon and expect to find a reasonable surface to work with.

And it had its own antique beauty, he found, subtle and unexpected. A place where time ran slow, where morning was a week long. But he wished he could see the stars. He imagined walking here in the lunar night, with the stars above: a huge canopy of them, reaching down to the horizon, undiminished by even the slightest trace of dust or mist.

But it would take all of twenty-eight days for a star to circle around the sky — and the stars here didn’t turn around Polaris, that great hinge in the skies of northern Earth, because the Moon’s axis was tipped compared to Earth’s.

…But, even as the stars slowly worked around the sky, the Earth would hang above you, fixed forever. That unmoving Earth would spook you, hanging there in the sky, blue and white, forty times as bright as a full Moon: winding through its remorseless phases, like an immense, blinking, unwavering eye.

To an inhabitant of the Moon, Earth was the blue eyeball of God, he thought.

They stopped every few hundred yards, so Henry could emplace seismometer stations. The little moving-coil devices, jug-shaped and trailing wires, were placed three at a time, to pick up the ground’s movement in three dimensions. He even had some experimental lightweight gravimeters, little stainless-steel cans, that were capable of getting down to an accuracy of ten milligals or so.

Henry was wiring the Moon.

Here and there, he also laid down small explosives. His intention was to do a little active seismography, using the explosives to send shock waves through the Moon’s interior, to be picked up by the seismos. The larger the net of sensors he could cast, the better the image of the interior of the Moon he would be able to build up; in a way the messages of the little seismometers were likely to be more significant than anything he would see, at the rille.

As they approached the rille, still following the old Apollo tracks, they had to drive up an incline. It was an outcrop of Cobra Head, the old volcanic dome here, the source of the lava which had gouged out the rille.

The thirty-year-old Rover performed impressively on the slope, seeming to carry them without effort. But, a hundred yards short of the edge of the rille, they stopped. The old Rover tracks snaked on further up the incline, but Geena was reluctant to risk taking the aged car any further.

When Henry tried to get up, he could barely raise his suited body out of the seat, and when he got to stand, he felt as if he might slip down the slope. The steepness here was deceptive.

“Henry. Help me.”

“What?”

“I think this damn thing is going to run downhill.”

Geena was holding onto the Rover. Henry could see one of its wheels was lifting off the surface.

Henry grabbed onto the Rover; it was so light he felt he could support it easily.

He pointed out an eroded old crater they could park in, and when Geena drove forward, they found the Rover was left almost level.

Henry turned to look back. He was three hundred feet high now, and the view was staggering. The sloping land swept away, obviously a sculpture of craters: craters on craters, young on old, small and sharp and cup-shaped on old and eroded and subtle. And he could see that big rubble-strewn crater they had driven through, looking as fresh as if it was dug out of the plain yesterday. Its sharp rim was a ring of dazzling white, and rays of boulders, black and white, clean and sharp, were scattered across the landscape for miles in all directions.

Further out the slope’s broad flank swept down and merged with a bright, undulating dust plain that was pocked with the gleaming white rims of craters, all of it diamond sharp, under a black sky. It was a wilderness, suspended beneath that starless interplanetary sky above.

And it was crossed by just two, closely paralleled, human-made car tracks.

Geena was already working on the Rover, carefully wiping Moon dust from its new batteries.

Henry took his equipment from the sample bags in back of the Rover, and from beneath its seats. They both had big Beta-cloth bags they loaded up with gear, and then slung over their shoulders. Geena had a coil of nylon rope she looped over one arm. And they both had torches, taped to their helmets.

Thus, laden with their gear, they loped away, towards the rille.

Henry stopped periodically, setting in place miniature acoustic flow monitors and seismometers, sensitive to high-frequency vibrations. This was part of the monitoring network he was going to build up around the rille, and whatever lay within it.

For a while they were still tracking the Apollo astronauts” exploration. But now they came to a point beyond which there were no Rover tracks, only footprints: two sets, tracking up and down the incline. Henry could see how the Apollo astronauts” tracks had diverged, as they loped about the hill, taking what samples they could in their haste. But he and Geena had only one purpose now.

They marched directly up the slope, ignoring the meanders of their predecessors, following the line of steepest ascent.

It was a difficult climb. The dust was thick: the slope was almost bare of rock, and the dust and rubble was churned up, mixed and messy dust that gave the mountain its smoothed-over shape. Maybe it looked attractive from afar, but on foot it was difficult terrain. What it meant was that with every step he took dust fell away from his feet, like soft sand, as if he was climbing the side of a dune.

He was out of breath in a few steps.

Still, he persisted.

He paused for a breath. He turned and looked back at the skeletal Rover. It looked like an ugly toy: squat and low, sitting there in a churned-up circle of dust. Its orange fenders and gold insulation were the brightest things on the surface of the Moon. A few yards behind him, Geena was labouring up the slope after him, her arms full of gear, her red commander’s armbands bright.

…He was on the Moon, he remembered suddenly; this was no routine hike.

The return of perspective was unwelcome.

He remembered some of the early, now lost, theories of the Moon’s surface. One geologist called Thomas Gold had warned that the Moon would be covered in a layer of fluffy dust dozens of feet thick. Armstrong and Aldrin would have to drop coloured weights to the surface before they landed; if the weights sank, they would have to abort their landing immediately, before their LM was swallowed. Gold had clung to those views even after unmanned craft had safely settled on the surface, but happily for Apollo 11 he had been proven wrong…

Maybe.

Now that he was approaching the nest of the Moonseed, Henry wondered whether Gold had been more correct than he knew. What if the layers of basaltic strata beneath his feet, infested by Moonseed, were indeed Gold’s dust?

He continued.

He reached a flat crest, and came suddenly on the rille: Schröter’s Valley. It was a gap in the landscape in front of them. It wound into the distance, its walls curving smoothly through shadows and sunlight.

As he walked further, the surface of the mare sloped gently towards the rille rim, and the regolith was getting visibly thinner. The rille walls themselves sloped at maybe twenty-five or thirty degrees.

He stopped, where the slope was still gentle.

The sun was behind him. The far walls were in full sunlight, and Henry could see layers: distinct layers of rock, poking through the light dust coating. They looked like layers of sedimentary rocks on Earth, sandstones or shales, laid down by ancient oceans, the myriad deaths of sea creatures. But what he was seeing, here, had nothing to do with water, or life. The story of the Moon, laid out for him here, was different.

These layers were lava flows. Over hundreds of millions of years, a succession of outpourings had flowed out of the Moon’s interior, covering and recovering the valley floor, building up the ground here.

But then, pulsing out of Cobra’s Head, a lava river had coursed down the slope of the older landscape, a brief band of light cutting savagely into the older layers. The flow cooled from the edges, the hardening rim confining the central channel. Eventually the channel even roofed over with hardening rock, and the lava stream cut deeply into the underlying mare basalt.

But the brief eruption of heat subsided rapidly. The remnant of the lava drained away and cooled, leaving a tunnel in the rock. Along much of its length the roofed-over tunnel collapsed, exposing its floor to the sunlight.

This will do, he thought.

Henry walked along the rille edge, until he came to a place where a boulder, four or five feet tall, was embedded in the inner wall of the rim. He sat down in the dirt, resting on his hands; the regolith crunched beneath his butt. He put his feet flat against the rock and started to push. It was hard to get any traction; the friction between his butt and the ground was so low he kept sliding backwards. Eventually he found a way to brace his arms at an angle behind him, and get more purchase.

Geena joined him. “What in hell are you doing?”

His exertions weren’t budging the rock, but they were lifting him up off the ground, to which the low G only casually stuck him. “Help me. It’s a tradition.”

“More science, Henry?”

“Hell, no. Come on.”

She sat down beside him. She pressed her feet into the face of the boulder and pushed, alongside Henry.

“Rock rolling,” Henry said between grunts of effort. “No geology field trip is complete until you’ve sent a boulder crashing down into a caldera, or a forested hillside—”

The boulder came out of its regolith socket with a grind he felt through his knees. With an eerie grace, the rock tipped forward. He tried to keep pushing, but it was gone, and there was no pressure under his feet; he slid a little way down the slope.

He leaned forward to see. As the rock started to fall it was a little like watching some huge inflatable, on Earth, bounding slowly down a hillside; but at length, as the low gravity worked in the resistance-free vacuum, the rock picked up speed. He watched it until it had plunged out of sight, in the deep shadow of the rille. It left a trail in the regolith, a line of shallow craters that looked as if they had been there for a billion years.

He listened for a while, but there was, of course, no noise, no crack as it reached that remote bottom.

“Um,” said Henry. “Kind of fast. Suddenly I feel vertiginous.”

On his butt he worked his way back up the slope, and stood up, yards from the eroded rim. He had left a track like a sand worm in the regolith. When he stood up his butt and legs were coated with dark grey dust; he tried to beat it out but only succeeded in grinding the stain deeper into the fabric.

Geena was surveying the area. She pointed. One set of tracks continued from this point, deeper into the rille.

The ghost of Jays Malone was close here, he thought.

She said, “You ready?”

“Let’s get it over.”

She took the rope from her shoulders, and knotted it professionally around Henry’s waist, taking care not to snag his backpack or his chest controls. Then she wrapped a length of it around a Chevy-sized rock, and took some slack herself.

For a moment they faced each other. Henry could see himself reflected in her gold visor, slumped forward in a simian pose under the weight of his backpack. But he could not see Geena’s face.

Behind her, he could see the camera on the Lunar Rover fixed on them, watching analytically.

He ought to say something. But this was Geena, for God’s sake. They were divorced. In full view of the world, what were they supposed to say now, as he prepared to confront an alien life form?

She said: “I’ll be here.”

“I know.” He licked his lips.

He thought he could see her nod, inside her helmet.

He picked up his tools and turned.

He walked forward, towards the rille. He went over a smooth crest, and started descending into the rille itself. But there was no sharp drop-off; like every other surface here the rim was eroded to smoothness, and the footing was secure. The rope trailed behind him, reluctant to uncurl and lie flat in this weak gravity.

Just to be sure of his footing, he clambered back up the slope. There were no problems.

He turned, and bounded several yards back down the slope. Even from here he couldn’t see the bottom of the rille; it was still hidden by the broad shoulder of the valley.

The footing was good here. The Moon, shaped by impacts, was littered with rocky rubble. But this close to the edge, a lot of those fragments would have tumbled into the rille, carrying off the dust, and that had left the regolith here very thin—

Suddenly his left foot disappeared, out from under him.

“Shit.”

He looked down with surprise. His leg was just sinking into a pit of soft dust, softer and deeper than any other place he had come across, anywhere on the Moon.

He brought his right foot forward, but he caught it on a rock, and he fell with some force onto his hands and knees. His leg came loose of the dust pit, but his momentum rolled him forward, and the roll carried him over on his right-hand side.

“Henry. Are you okay?”

“Just a little soft here. I caught my… I stumbled over that rock.”

“You need me to help you?”

“No.”

He pushed his way to his feet, bouncing upright like a mannequin. He stepped back a little way from that patch of soft dust. It was a rough disc, he saw — and it swirled, gently.

Just as he’d seen in Scotland, on another planet, just as he’d predicted, he had found it here.

“Henry?”

“I’m fine.”

He carried on down the slope, following the tracks of Jays Malone as he had searched for his piece of lunar bedrock.

…And then he saw it, sheltering beneath a hummock in the regolith: an irregular-shaped crater in the regolith, scuffed by footprints. It was the original resting place of sample 86047, here on the Moon, a rock that had travelled a quarter-million miles from this spot, to his lab in Edinburgh.

He bent sideways, awkward in his suit, and ruffled the surface of the regolith with his fingertips, with reverence.

Then he straightened up. The tracks didn’t go any further, any deeper into the rille. The ghosts of Apollo couldn’t help him any more; and when he passed out of line of sight of Geena he wouldn’t be able to speak to her. Now, at last, he had to go where no human had travelled before.

He raised his gold sun-visor. For now, he wouldn’t need it.

Clutching his equipment, trailing the rope behind him, he marched on down the slope, into the shadow of the rille wall, alone.

It was dark here, the only light scattered from the far side of the rille.

He lit his helmet torch. It cast an ellipse of light on the regolith surface before him, and back-scattering illuminated a short way beyond that. He had to keep his head down so the light showed him where his feet would come down, so he could see only a few feet ahead of himself at any time.

He was truly, he thought, approaching the heart of darkness.

At first he moved cautiously. But the slope here, sandblasted by micrometeorite rain, was still gentle. Walkback limits, he thought; he could afford to go a little faster.

He lengthened his stride. Soon he was bounding in slow-motion leaps, sailing over the rocks and dust. When he landed he sent up sprays of dust which collapsed back immediately to the surface, like handfuls of gravel.

The trick with the light now was to keep it focused on the spot he was likely to land, rather than directly under his feet; it took some coordination, but he was getting the hang of it.

He allowed himself a moment of exhilaration. Hot shit, he thought; this is the way to do a field trip.

But now the ground was getting steeper, the regolith layer thinner; the sprays raised by his footfalls were diminishing.

He tried to slow. But he’d underestimated his momentum; old Sir Isaac was pushing at his back, and the surface under his feet was slithery. He leaned back and tried to dig his heels in, but that succeeded only in tipping him over backwards.

He slid six, ten feet on his butt, deeper into the rille. In his stiff Shuttle suit it was like sliding down a ski slope in a box.

He tumbled to a halt.

He sat there in darkness, breathing hard, his torch showing him only a few yards ahead, so close was the rille’s horizon now.

His rope gathered itself up, went taut, and he got a good hard tug on the chest. Geena, telling him to behave himself.

Well, she was right. It was going to be a lot harder coming back up.

He got up and slapped ineffectually at his thighs, trying to dust himself off. He held onto the rope, and stepped cautiously, ever deeper, his feet scraping now over almost bare basalt.

He came to a place where the slope was steeper than one in one. There was a basalt ledge here, a place where one of the lava strata had become exposed; it made a place to stand. When he looked up, his torch showed him the rille wall tipping up and away from him, dauntingly steep and tall.

He wasn’t sure he could go any further in. This would have to do.

He took his instrument bag off his shoulder, and placed it carefully at the back of the ledge. Then he got to his knees, and crept forward to the lip of the ledge. The suit fought him the whole way, but he crawled determinedly.

He stuck his head over the edge.

His torchlight splashed down over the steepening rille wall. More basalt layers. He inspected them briefly, noting their thickness, their difference in composition.

The whole history of mare volcanism was laid out here, clear as a road-map. He longed for a couple of grad students, a truck-load of sample bags. Maybe just by visual inspection, a couple of samples, he could achieve some good science here…

But he knew he mustn’t. His objective lay further on, and he must hurry to achieve it before his life support limits cut him short.

He lifted his head, and let his torch beam play further down the slope.

It looked as if the base of the rille, here, was no more than thirty or forty feet below him. The surface was smooth, silvery and flat.

It looked as if a river of some fluid had been dammed here.

Moonseed dust.

He raised his head further. His ellipse of light lengthened, until the glow became too attenuated to make out. As far as he could see, across the width of the rille, and to left and right along its length, the Moonseed dust lay, shimmering in his torchlight. It looked as if a river of mercury had come lapping through the rille’s dusty walls.

He found a loose rock, a fist-sized pebble an arm’s-length away. On impulse, he picked it up. He looked at the big astronaut’s Rolex on his wrist, set its timer, and dropped the rock.

He watched the rock fall, at first with dreamy slowness, and then with greater, more Earth-like velocity as the slow gravity had time to work. If he got the timing right he would be able to calculate pretty accurately how far below him that surface was…

In the light of his torch, the rock hit the surface, and disappeared. The Moonseed dust closed over it without a ripple, as if it had never existed.

He checked his watch. Four seconds. The Moonseed was forty-two, forty-three feet below him.

He knew he had to wait for the results of his seismic analysis. But already he knew what he would find out.

The whole damn Moon was rotten with Moonseed, just as he’d suspected.

And yet the Moon was still here, unlike Venus.

He crawled to the back of the ledge. He worked his way along the ridge, setting out his instruments, little tin-can boxes containing sensitive seismometers, shrouded in thermal blankets. The seismometer signals would be analysed as real-time data and in terms of frequency to record the ground’s vibration. He set up combinations of theodolites and electronic distance meters that might give some clue as to the deformation of the ground, even here on the side of the rille. And he deployed, close to the rim of his ledge, a small cospec, a correlation spectrometer, that would be able to measure emission rates of any gases it could detect. The instruments would be connected to a central data collection and communications unit and batteries by multiplex cables, that he plugged into the backs of the boxes.

All these instruments were improvised from lightweight gear deployed by VDAP to gather real-time data on volcanic events. It was true that what he was investigating here was no volcano, but even volcanology was a young science; he hadn’t had any smarter ideas on what to bring here, to this infestation on the Moon.

He actually enjoyed setting up the science gear: plugging cables into their sockets, testing power couplings and data transmissions. It was simple work, no more complex than putting together a back-yard barbecue. Yet it was good for his soul to have some familiar tasks to get through, here amid all this strangeness. He moved between the instruments, the fans of his backpack whirring, the oxygen blowing cool over his face.

When the science station was set up, he stepped back from it, towards the edge of the basalt ledge. He ran his eye over the connections one more time, making sure he hadn’t missed something dumb, checking all the power lights were switched on. He didn’t want to have to come back down here and fix anything.

However, it all looked fine. Now all he had to do was climb out of here, trailing a comms link cable behind him, so the station could talk to the surface, and so to Earth and the shelter.

But there seemed to be a softness, beneath the tread of his right foot.

He looked down sharply. He was maybe four feet from the lip. But suddenly the rock surface was crumbling like wet sand.

The last three or four feet of the ledge just disappeared, in a half-circle extending maybe a yard around him. Under a surface of some kind of duricrust, he realized, this whole ledge was rotten with Moonseed dust. Suddenly he was falling, amid a cloud of dust, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

Moonseed sparkled in the light of his torch.

Falling on the Moon:

Dreamlike slowness.

In the first second — the first one or two rattled heartbeats — he only fell through a couple of feet. He fell stiffly, his suit starfishing around him, as if he was in some body-shaped coffin.

Two seconds, and, picking up speed inexorably, he had fallen ten feet. The rope was coiling behind him, still fixed to his waist. How much was there left? Enough to stop him hitting the Moonseed river?

Would he just drag his anchor rock off the lip of the rille after him?

Three seconds, maybe twenty feet, and at last his speed was becoming respectable. No air here, so no terminal velocity; if there was a hole all the way to the centre of the Moon you would just keep on falling, accelerating steadily, until—

His feet hit the surface of the Moonseed river.

It worked its way up his legs, to his waist, sluggish ripples spreading out from him. His speed slowed rapidly as the resistance of the dust built up. He could feel the pressure of the dust on his legs, crumpling the inflated pressure suit.

Now he was sinking slowly, as if into treacle. He tried to keep his arms out.

Up to his waist. He couldn’t move his legs.

He would presumably reach some level at which he would be buoyant. The dust was all but a fluid; Archimedes” principle would work, even here. How deep would that be? So deep that the pressure of the dust would crack his visor, ramming itself into his mouth and nose and eyes? Or maybe the end would be less spectacular: eventually, the heat trapped by the dust would surely kill him… The dust was up to his chest now. But his rate of descent was slowing. He tried to kick at the dust; maybe if he could lie on his back he could float like a swimmer on the Dead Sea. But he couldn’t move his legs, not so much as an inch; it was as if his pressure suit was embedded in concrete.

But the rope was taut, pulling at his waist. Geena. She was trying to drag him out of here.

He lifted his hands, and grabbed at the rope which snaked out from his waist like an umbilical cord. He could feel the tension; he imagined Geena at the surface, hauling, digging her feet into the regolith.

It was working. He could feel the dust falling away from his legs. Maybe he was out of it already.

He kept pulling, and Geena kept hauling, and he could feel himself rise with dreamy grace. Maybe he was going to live through this after all…

But now he became aware of a new problem. He couldn’t hear the pumps and fans of his backpack any more, nor feel the breath of oxygen over his face.

When he looked down at his chest panel, there was nothing but red lights. The heat, the pressure of the dust had killed it.

But right now he felt fine. Better than fine, in fact. He felt alert, confident. When he looked up above, he could see a line of white light, the sunlit upper face of the rille. Actually, he felt a little high.

He had no doubts, suddenly, that he would live through this; in a couple of minutes he would be with Geena, and then back to the shelter, and Earth, and in a few years it would be no more than a sea story he could share with Jane…

He was flat against the rock face, being dragged upward, almost passively.

Now he was approaching daylight. He was being hauled up the shallow upper slope of the rille, like a swordfish being landed on some Greek island beach.

He seemed to be lying on his back. The sun, a ball of white light, flooded his helmet. He turned his head towards it and let all that pure light pour into his open eyes. It was really quite beautiful. And there were colours, like the kaleidoscopic sparkle of a granite thin slice in his petrological microscope, all around him, the colours of the Moon.

But now there was somebody before him, a snowman figure loping around him as if in a dream. He — or she — reached down and closed something over his face, and the world turned to gold.

He closed his eyes.

Gold, grey, black.

Henry’s backpack was just a ruin. Crushed and overheated. Even his emergency oxygen supply, from the purge tanks, seemed to have failed. He was clearly suffering hypoxia. A few more minutes of this and he would suffer permanent brain damage.

Geena dug hoses out of her backpack. She coupled her own emergency air supply to Henry’s. That would be enough for an hour or so. Then she hooked up more hoses so Henry could share her supply of cooling water; he’d broil before they got back to the shelter otherwise.

She was tempted to peer into his helmet, to see if he was breathing, if he was responding. But it wouldn’t do any good. What could she do, take off his gloves to see if his fingernails were blue?

She pulled him up. He half-stood, inert, like a statue, so stiff was his suit. She managed to get his arm over her shoulder, her arm around his waist. Under lunar gravity he only weighed a couple of stone, but he was awkward, a stiff, massive shape. As she hauled him back towards the Rover, his feet dragged in the regolith.

It was going to be a race back to the shelter, to get Henry inside before that emergency pack expired. At least driving back would be easier. They only had to follow their own tracks back, to be sure of their destination.

But if anything else went wrong — if a fault developed with her own backpack, or the thirty-year-old Rover — it was quite possible neither of them would live through this.

She tried to hurry, forcing Henry forward, across the slippery regolith.

4

Henry became conscious again, long before she got him back to the shelter.

“We have to get back,” were his first words.

“I know. We’re going.”

“I have to start analysing the data.” He looked at the hoses which snaked between their backpacks. “Thanks for saving my life.”

“Pleasure.”

“I don’t think my fall affected the station I set up.”

“You checked as you fell to your doom, did you?”

“Yes,” he said, without irony.

They bounced across the surface of the Moon, back to the shelter.

She parked as close as she could to the shelter. It wasn’t easy to get inside; linked by the hoses with their fragile couplings, they had to move like Siamese twins, taking care over every step.

Once inside, she checked the shelter’s air and took off her helmet and gloves. She could feel a gush of moist heat escaping from the joints at her wrists and neck; it was a relief to shuck off the suit and move freely.

Henry went straight to work. He set up his pc, checked the data link to the remote station he’d set up in the rille, and started tapping at his keyboard. And he prepared some of his samples on slides for his ridiculous high-school microscope.

He worked feverishly. She knew Henry of old; in this mood, whatever his physical state, he wouldn’t be dissuaded. It used to irritate her. In fact she thought of Henry as a workaholic. Well, maybe he was. But right now, she realized, whatever understanding Henry achieved today, here on the Moon, might be crucial for them all.

So she let him work, and contented herself with a health check; he didn’t seem to have been permanently harmed by his brush with the Moonseed.

She tended to her equipment. That pesky Moon dust had continued to etch into her gear, she found. It was now ground deeply into the fabric of her suit, and even when she tried to scrape it out with her fingertips she only succeeded in working it into her fingers and under her nails. The metal seals at wrist and neck were getting quite badly corroded. And the handle of Henry’s geology hammer had had its rubber coating worn away to bare metal.

She recharged her backpack. She took a look at Henry’s, but it was ruined beyond her capability to repair it here. When they next left the shelter they would have to do it bound together once more.

She made some food. A hot drink: camomile tea, one of Henry’s favourites. She made him drink and eat, and he complied, but he didn’t seem to notice what he was being fed.

She sipped her own tea. Even freshly made, it didn’t seem hot enough. One of the old clichés of lunar travel, she thought: water boils at lower temperature in low pressure. Well, it was a fact of physics, and here she was living it out.

Still, the tea was a comfort.

Afterwards, she pulled on her sleeping bag and lay down. She ought to try to get some sleep, she knew; God alone knew what the next day was going to bring. She considered filling her bag with water from the tank. In the circumstances, though, the drizzle of radiation seemed the least of her worries.

She closed her eyes, and listened to the tapping of Henry’s fingers on the keypad of his laptop, his characteristic, soft, under-the-breath mutterings — frustration, surprise, satisfaction. Just like old times, she thought. As she drifted, the drizzle of key taps seemed to stretch out, as if Henry was some scientifically-minded robot, slowly running down.

Maybe she slept.

Henry tapped her on the shoulder. He was hollow-eyed, but he seemed healthy enough. He was chewing on a rice cake.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“But you’re wide awake.”

“I am now.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You aren’t working.”

He shrugged. “I think I’m done for now. Monica Beus sent me another e-mail. Smuggled it past the NASA smiley-face censors.”

“And?”

“And what? The world is coming to an end. Where do you want me to start?”

The event in Scotland, its scale unprecedented in the lifetime of the human species, had shaken the world on every level — physical, political, economic. Governments were collapsing all over. Someone had taken out the UN building in New York with a backpack nuke. Britain had invaded the Republic of Ireland, seeking living space.

The NASA satellite pictures were scary. White infra-red blurs that were whole populations, running. Black scars showed where thousands, millions, had died. People were fleeing in herds, seeking safety where none existed anywhere on Earth, all dignity gone.

After the collapse of the international order, wars had flared all over, in every troublespot you could think of, nuclear, chemical, biological, conventional. But it hadn’t taken long for the collapse and general chaos to reach a point where large-scale warfare was impossible, and the conflicts descended into low-level, low-tech — but nonetheless bloody — local brushfire.

“Good news,” Henry said humourlessly. “Famine is killing more people than war. Oh, and NASA centers have been coming under attack.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

He shrugged. “You got to blame somebody.”

He was talking too fast, his mood strange.

She pushed her way out of her sleeping bag. “Show me what you have.”

He brought over his laptop. The screen showed a sphere in false colours, yellow, orange and red, slowly rotating, semi-transparent so she could see to its core.

He asked, “What does this look like?”

Under a near-intact crust, the sphere was riddled with pockets and chambers. The core was picked out by a hard, dark blue knot. “A rotten apple.”

“It’s the deep structure of the Moon.”

“Right.”

He explained how he’d produced this image.

The Moon was a quiet planet.

It wasn’t just the lack of air. The Moon had some seismic activity. In fact the heaviest quakes were imposed by the Earth, every month, “deep forming Moonquakes” caused by the dark tides Earth raised in the rocks of the waterless Moon. And there were occasional “shallow Moonquakes” — smaller, isolated events, of which nobody knew the cause. There were even occasional landslides, caused by impacts or quakes.

But the Moon’s seismic violence was only a hundred-millionth part of the energy that racked the Earth.

On the airless Moon there could be no sound, of course. But the Moon, paradoxically, transmitted sound well, through its solid structure. The Moon had “high Q’, Henry told her. That meant that when you hit the Moon, as he had done with his implanted charges, it would ring like a bell. And if you set a seismometer on the surface, it could pick up your footsteps as you lumbered away in your spacesuit.

What all this meant was that Henry’s networks of seismometers were a powerful tool for unravelling the meaning of the rocky waves that passed through the Moon’s interior.

“…I have a database and analysis program here called BOB II,” he said. He brought up lists of commands. “A neat piece of work. Command-drive, interactive. It’s adapted from the data analysis suite VDAP uses — the volcano disaster people — for the real-time analysis of time series data of seismic events in crisis situations. And—”

“Henry, I don’t care about the software. Tell me what this means.”

For answer he reduced the Moon’s image, and paired it with another. “This is what we called a puffball rock, from Edinburgh. Just a couple of feet or so across. Rotten with Moonseed, ready to blow.”

It was an irregular elliptical shape, something like a potato. But it showed the same pattern of pockets through its structure as the Moon.

“You’re telling me the Moon is a puffball rock.”

“I’m telling you the Moonseed has infested it, as it did rocks on Earth.” There were differences of detail, but the patterns of the two infestations were the same. “You can see the relative scaling of these chambers — the way they cluster, like bubbles butting up against one another. We find the same in smaller rocks. Even dust fragments.”

“…The Moonseed is all the way through the Moon,” she said. “That’s what this means.”

“Yes.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I guess that isn’t so obvious, unless you study this stuff. Yes. The Moonseed is all the way through the Moon. I kind of knew it would be,” Henry said sadly. “The assumption of mediocrity. Jays Malone wasn’t looking for Moonseed, so from the point of view of the Moonseed he landed at random, but he found it anyway. If it was here, at Aristarchus, it was going to be everywhere…

“Geena, the Moonseed works in a fractal way. The same structure regardless of scale. Whatever rock it settles in, it sets up the same kind of infestation pattern through the structure. And if you slice off a small piece of that rock, you’ll find the same structure repeated on the smaller scale, and if you slice off a piece of that, the same again… Right down to the microscopic.” He shook his head. “You have to admire the design. Cold, simple, logical. Yet with time, with the most minimal of resources, it allows the Moonseed to infest a world. The Moonseed is adapted to the universe. Perhaps the Moonseed, not we, is going to be the true master of the future…”

“You know, I hate it when you talk like that. It’s a sign of your morbid personality.”

He looked surprised. “Morbid?”

“Sure. How often would you wake me at three a.m. full of angst about death and futility? Morbid, Henry, that’s you.”

“Well, I guess I have a lot to be morbid about.”

She studied the Moon image once more. “Here’s something not in your puffball rock.” She tapped the dark centre of the image.

He rubbed his eyes. “It’s a mass anomaly at the centre of the Moon.”

“A mascon?”

“No. More dense, relatively, than that. More regular.”

“Regular?”

“It shows plane surfaces. Evidence of internal structure. It’s tens of miles across; it must be very dense. The data’s a little patchy…”

“What is it?”

He paused before replying. “Geena, I didn’t come to the Moon just to find if the Moonseed is spread right through it. I knew that must be true, if a galoot like Jays Malone could land at random and pick up a sample at his feet. All this is just confirmation.”

“Then why?”

“I had to find out why the Moon continues to exist at all. Why doesn’t the Moonseed destroy the Moon, as it did Venus? Something here has to be suppressing it. Making it inert. Oh, probably the stuff near the surface went off long ago, under the action of sunlight, but the reaction, the spread of the Moonseed, was stopped. Like everything else on the Moon, the Moonseed infestation here is old; the surface activity finished long ago.”

“Are you saying that this thing, at the core of the Moon, is suppressing the Moonseed?”

“I think so.” His eyes were fixed on nothing. “It’s the Witch in the Well, Geena. The demon at the heart of the Moon.”

“But what is it? Some geological thing?”

“No…”

He told her his hypothesis.

It came to Earth when the Solar System was young.

One day, human scientists would call it the Impactor.

It had about the mass of Mars, a tenth of Earth’s. Humans would later speculate that it was a young planet in its own right.

But they were wrong. It was not a planet.

Its heart was a dense block of matter, complex, its surface shifting, silvery. It was a hundred miles across, extraordinarily dense.

This core came trailing a cloud of silvery motes. Where the motes touched, worldlets were transformed. Raw materials rained down on the surface of the core.

It was heading for the sun. There, less than a solar radius from the young sun’s roiling surface, a great sail would be unfurled — or rather assembled, from the materials leached from the young Solar System. The sail would be almost perfectly reflective, so much so that it would have been cool, to a human touch. Humans would one day speculate about such objects, as designs for craft to cross the gulfs between the stars.

But this was no craft. To a human eye, the sail would have looked organic, its surface as structured — and as beautiful — as a young leaf.

The flood of raw sunlight would hurl the core, the sail and its attendant cloud out of the Solar System, and on to a new destination, another young system, pregnant with resources.

Perhaps that was the plan. Or perhaps the intention was different. Or perhaps there was no conscious intention.

From without, it was impossible to say.

Whatever its purpose, the object barrelled through the dusty plane of the Solar System, heading for the sun.

But there seemed to be something in the way.

“Earth,” Geena said. “You’re saying the Moonseed hive — ship, whatever — was the Impactor which hit the Earth—”

“And created the Moon. And it’s still here, deep inside the Moon.” He laughed. “Ironic, isn’t it? Without that impact — without the Moonseed — life on Earth wouldn’t even exist. But now it’s going to destroy us.”

She studied him. “Let me summarize. A massive Moonseed hive crashes into the Earth. The impact forms the Moon. The hive becomes trapped at the core of the Moon. Its cloud of, umm, nano manufacturer insects, is trapped in the Moon’s fabric. They stop their destructive behaviour because of some kind of asimov inhibitor… It sounds like something your dippy girlfriend would come up with.”

“Jane’s too sensible for this stuff. Look, it’s a consistent hypothesis. This mass concentration at the heart of the Moon, the wreckage, is actually a confirmation.”

She said, “But what about Venus? All that stuff about a black hole rocket—”

“I think that fits. If a hive gets trapped in a star’s gravity well, for whatever reason, it needs a more energetic propulsion system to escape than a solar sail.”

“But in this case—”

“In this case, the hive got itself more deeply trapped than that.” He stretched out on the floor; there were bruises on his neck, where his suit had caught him during the fall. “So I figured it out. I found what I came to find. The trouble is, it’s no use to us.”

“Why?”

“Because what is suppressing the Moonseed is something inside the wreck of a five-billion-year-old hive at the core of the Moon. Kind of out of reach, don’t you think?”

He bit into his rice cake, and chewed slowly, his expression neutral.

“So what now?”

“Now,” he said, “I do some thinking.”

“Thinking? What the hell is there to think about?”

But he wouldn’t reply. He turned back to his screen, and its light filled his eyes.

His plan, she thought. He is figuring out his plan, the one he won’t tell anyone. Whatever the hell it is, it had better be good.

She persuaded Henry he should sleep.

She watched over him, listening to the whir of the fans and extractors.

She looked out at the Moon’s moulded plains. Alone on the Moon, the only conscious mind in the world, she was driven in on herself.

Time stretched out here, in the Moon’s shallow gravity, she thought.

She touched her face, the lines there, the stiffness of her greying hair. She was, of course, ageing, as was every other member of the human race. Falling helplessly into a black future, hour by hour. And you don’t even, she thought, get a day off for good behaviour.

She checked her watch. The Rolex ticked slowly, steadily. It was 3.00 a.m., Houston time. The morbid hour.

Their human activities were regulated by the constant heartbeat ticks of their Rolexes and timers, the limits of their consumables, the working of their equipment. The chaotic clamour of Earth’s bad news. But that busy human ticking was irrelevant to the grand, slow timescales here, the time of the Moon. A day here lasted a month; she had worked for six or seven hours on the surface, and there had barely been a change even in the angle of the sunlight.

And beneath that there was a still grander timescale, of the slow evolution of the Moon itself. She thought about all she had seen — the ejecta hills, the rille, the crater-sculpted plains — and she knew that she could have come here a billion years before, or a billion years from now, to find basically the same scene.

The Moon cared nothing for time. And the longer she stayed, the more her own busy schedules came to seem irrelevant. She felt as if her sense of time was dissolving, stretching like melted candle-wax. Perhaps she could sink down into the Moon’s rhythms. Perhaps if she kept still, she could lie here long enough for the Moon to turn beneath her, and carry her into the night.

Henry seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

In a way, he had what he wanted. And there was the paradox of a scientist. On one level Henry was satisfied. What had driven him in his feverish efforts earlier — what had driven him all the way to the Moon — wasn’t so much fear for himself, a desire to save those he loved, as simple curiosity. Now, Henry had his answer.

But that was too simple. Henry was no one-dimensional Brainiac. She suspected he understood the Moonseed on a level that defied her. And when he contemplated it — its simplicity of operation, its immense timescales, its tenacity, its capacity to destroy worlds — it seemed he felt genuine awe.

She suspected he envied the Moonseed its lack of the complexity that bedevilled human life. Maybe Henry would like to be a half-machine, like the Moonseed.

But even that wasn’t the bottom of the truth, she thought sadly. Because, plumb in the middle of Henry’s life, there you had dippy Jane, his relationship with her based on nothing but — she forced herself to admit it — love.

Maybe she’d never really understood Henry, she thought. Or vice versa. Probably they’d never stood a chance.

She probed at her own feelings. She felt — numb. Bewildered. Maybe she had gone through too much; maybe she was in shock. How were you supposed to feel, when your ex-husband says your species is doomed?

Geena had grown up, in San Francisco, without religion. She’d never felt the need of what she thought of as its ersatz, manipulative comforts. So she had never had the expectancy of surviving her own death.

More than that: she’d grown up with the message of science, which was that humanity had a finite tenure on the planet, come what may. If nuclear war didn’t get you, the eco-collapse would, or the dinosaur killer, or the return of the glaciers, or the extinction of the sun, or… The doom scenario depended only on which timescale you chose to think about.

She was an advocate of space travel. Colonies off the planet would have boosted mankind’s chances of survival. If NASA’s more grandiose plans had come to pass and there were now, say, three or four hundred people living in some kind of Antarctic-type research station on Mars, right now, they wouldn’t have to worry so much about this Moonseed thing.

The Earth might die. Even the Moon. Mankind wouldn’t have to.

But it was too late for that.

The fact was humans just weren’t adapted to living anywhere away from Earth — the deep gravity well and thick, complex atmosphere they’d evolved in — and there was nowhere else in the Solar System for them to go.

She was glad she didn’t have a kid…

“What are you thinking about?”

Henry’s voice made her jump. He was lying in his sleeping bag, eyes wide in the dark.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I was thinking about the Moon.”

He scratched his couple of days” growth of beard. He never could grow a beard, she thought; it came up comically patchy. He said, “Plutarch said the Moon was a way-station for our souls. Humans have to die twice. First on Earth, where the body is severed from the mind and soul, and returned to dust. And the mind and soul travel to the Moon. There, a second death occurs, with mind and soul separating. The mind flies off to the sun, where it’s absorbed and gives birth to a new soul. But your soul stays here, on the Moon, sinking into the Moon dust, clinging onto dreams and memories… Maybe all that stuff about rocket ships and Cape Canaveral and Baikonur was a fantasy. A false memory. Maybe we died, you and me. Maybe we’re just clumps of memories, sinking into the regolith.”

She was shivering, despite the warmth of the hab.

“Shut up, Henry.”

“Sorry.” He rubbed his face; his patchy beard looked to have grown a little denser.

She felt she couldn’t stand the stillness any longer.

“Henry, for Christ’s sake.”

“What?”

“Tell me your plan.”

He hesitated.

“I haven’t shared this with anybody,” he said.

“Not even dippy Jane?”

“Not even Jane.”

“I promise not to laugh at you. But I could use some good news right now.”

“…I think there’s maybe a way out. It’s risky. The math is chancy; it depends on a lot of assumptions.”

“Like what?”

“How much ice there is at the South Pole. What happens when you drop a nuke on lunar Moonseed; what kind of energy amplification factor you can achieve here, in the presence of the hive remnant—”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

“I had to get here to be sure. I had to confirm the Moonseed is as extensive as I suspected. And—”

“What?”

“I had to sleep on it.”

“Why?”

He sat up. The sleeping bag fell slowly away from his chest, exposing his longjohns. “There are a lot of costs. Suppose I told you it might be possible to save some of mankind.”

“Not all?”

“Not all. A handful. Maybe enough to start again.”

“Right now, I’d take it.”

“Okay. Now suppose I told you it would mean wrecking the Moon, as it exists now, before we have any kind of chance to study it, to learn from it. Gone forever.”

That made her pause.

“Go on.”

“Suppose I told you it might cost us our lives.” He grinned tightly. “In fact, probably. That’s the part I’ve been sleeping on.”

She closed her eyes. “I guess we’re all soldiers now,” she said. “And this is the front line.”

“Suppose I told you it will certainly cost Arkady his life.”

She kept her face still. “Why?”

“We talked about this. Because somehow Arkady is going to have to deliver that nuke of his to the surface, at the South Pole. It’s kind of hard to see how he can do that without at least stranding himself in orbit. Look, Geena, when I came out here I didn’t know what Arkady meant to you.”

“Would that make a difference now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s face it. It’s complicated.”

“Then we must ask Arkady how he feels.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we must.”

“Tell me what you got.”

He opened up his laptop, and started to explain.

And that was how it started.

They got into a complex four-way discussion, involving Houston, Korolyov, Arkady up in orbit, the two of them huddled in their shelter.

The mission planners in Moscow and Houston came up with a way for Arkady to deliver the bomb as Henry asked. It was actually Arkady’s idea. They chewed it over from every which way.

It lasted hours. It involved geologists, orbital mechanics specialists, NASA managers, even politicians.

The plan was wild, implausible, resting on a lot of unproven assumptions. And none of them — Arkady, Geena or Henry — had a hope of living through it, to see if it worked.

But, she slowly realized, they were going to do it anyhow.

Eventually they got the go-ahead. The consensus was, they had little, after all, to lose by trying Henry’s outrageous idea.

Arkady, of course, agreed immediately, as Geena knew he would.

When she thought about it, his proposal was entirely in line with his character. Because it would allow him to become a hero at last: a new Gagarin, transcending the old, the saviour of the planet.

And as they talked on, the sun climbed imperceptibly into the sky, and the slow lunar morning wore on towards its long noon.

5

The procedures for the final operation were rather intricate. Arkady copied them down by hand, on the backs of checklists for the trans-Earth injection burn and Earth-return aerobraking manoeuvre, neither of which would be required now. And when he had transcribed them he read them back to the ground controllers, in English and Russian.

He was forced to perform a brief space walk.

He opened the forward hatch, in the nose of the Soyuz’s orbital module, and thrust his head and shoulders into space. Then he clambered out, hauling the laser package after him.

The laser was an American Star Wars toy. Developed at Phillips Labs for the USAF, it was designed to be carried by a 747 aircraft, and used to shoot down short-range missiles. The technology was simple, light and robust, and no doubt inordinately expensive.

Still, the technology was remarkable. The laser was fuelled by hydrogen peroxide which was mixed with chlorine to produce oxygen atoms. At hypersonic speeds, the oxygen was forced with iodine into the lasing cavity, which was a container no bigger than a breadbox, with mirrors at either end. When the oxygen reacted with the iodine it emitted light which was bounced between the mirrors, before being released…

The power generated by this miniature contraption was more than a megawatt.

It had seemed absurd when Henry Meacher had requested this system. What was he expecting, dogfights with the Moonseed in orbit around the Moon? But now, it seemed, its true destiny was becoming clear.

It was a simple matter to fix the laser in place on the outer hull, with silver wire and tape, so that its blunt nozzle pointed ahead of the Soyuz. Arkady used his sextant to check its orientation; it must point directly along the axis of the craft.

When he closed the hatch and pressurized, he found the compartment filled with the sharp scent of space, the tang of scorched metal.

Next, he considered the nuclear weapon, the B61-11 bunker-buster, stowed here in the orbital compartment.

The laser could be controlled from a laptop computer, which he would have close to him during the landing. He ensured that the nuclear weapon could be triggered from the same device.

It was, thought Arkady, at heart a simple problem.

Henry insisted that his nuclear device, the bunker-buster, must be delivered to a precise point, at the very centre of the South Pole-Aitken Basin. But the nuclear device was in lunar orbit, on board Soyuz, and simply dropping it, at orbital speeds, would not suffice.

But to leave orbit and land took energy to remove the velocity with which a spacecraft circled the Moon. The two landers used in the mission had expended that energy in the form of rocket fuel.

Now there were no more landers available. And, just like the Apollo Command Module, Arkady’s Soyuz was not designed to land on the Moon.

Nevertheless, it had been decided, it would have to, in order to complete this new mission.

In the 1980s NASA had actually studied this mode of landing, if briefly. It opened up a new area of knowledge, tentatively called “harenodynamics’, which was a fancy Latin-derived term for “sliding’. Arkady had once attended a conference on lunar bases, industrialization and settlement, which had touched on the subject; when he raised it now with NASA’s Mission Control at Houston, it had not taken long for the back room people there to dig the material out of their archives.

And even less time to express their disbelief.

The trouble was, a Moon landing required a disproportionate amount of fuel. Because it had no air, either for frictional braking, or for supporting gliding or parachuting, the Moon gave its visitors no help on the way down.

But harenodynamics was a way of forcing the Moon to help after all. If it could be made to work, it could provide a way of landing that would need just ten per cent of the fuel of a conventional landing.

The trouble was, nobody had ever tested the idea, even on Earth, let alone the Moon. And Soyuz wasn’t built for it anyhow; there was a consensus that you’d need significant advances in a number of material technologies to make the technique reliable, if it was possible at all.

And besides, all pilots who looked at the papers hated the whole idea. If it was ever applied at all, surely it would be only for unmanned cargo drones.

But — as Arkady had immediately realized when he heard Henry’s request — in the current circumstance, there was really no choice at all.

He would go through with this because he had faith in Henry, and because he trusted Geena; her relationship with Henry had finished unhappily, but she would not select a fool.

And besides, as far as he could see, it was only Henry who had fully understood the implications of the Moonseed infestation from the beginning, and so Arkady must do what was necessary to implement his plans.

But on Earth, arguments raged on.

There were hardly any scientists who were prepared to validate Henry’s grand proposal. The Americans” greatest concern seemed to be allowing a Russian access to their prized weaponry.

The Russian authorities were rather more focused on the humanity of it. TsUP at Korolyov at first flatly refused Arkady permission to proceed with this scheme. Breaking with custom, his personal physician was brought on the loop to try to persuade him to return to Earth. If he came home, perhaps some alternative plan could be found — for instance, perhaps an unmanned missile could deliver a nuclear weapon as Henry desired.

But Arkady knew that could only cause delay. And it was self-evident that launches of any kind might soon become impossible from the surface of Earth; already many facilities at Canaveral had been destroyed in terrorist actions, and were in any event under threat from tsunamis. This might be the only chance.

In an attempt to persuade Arkady to desist, they even flew in his sister to TsUP, and had her talk to him on the ground-to-air loop.

It was never easy, Arkady had found, to talk to family and friends from space. Life in space — even on a routine Earth-orbit mission — was rather like a commercial airline pilot’s: hours of tedium, punctuated by moments of extreme terror. If you tried to describe the tedium, it was simply dull; if you talked about the terror, you sounded melodramatic — worse, you might finish up frightening the person who cared about you enough to call you.

It made for awkward conversation.

But his sister knew him, and was wise. Nor would she play the part demanded of her by TsUP.

She spoke to him of simple family matters. Vitalik asked me to say hello, she said. Vitalik was Lusia’s son, Arkady’s nephew. He is at summer camp. He is getting happier. He swims in the sea, he rehearses plays, he is doing arts and crafts. It was different in our day.

“Yes.” At the Soviet pioneer camps when Arkady was a boy, the children had been subject to meetings and political training, so much so they were sometimes deprived of sleep. Not everything about the breakup of the Soviet Union, they agreed, was necessarily so bad. And so on. Lusia spoke further of Vitalik’s small projects and achievements.

She said nothing of his intentions, the fate of the world. She was simply saying goodbye, on behalf of the world, the family he had left behind.

She knew, as he did, that his proposed course of action would mean the final sacrifice. Even if, by some miracle, he survived the landing itself, he could not hope to live through what followed.

But then Henry and Geena were making as big a sacrifice.

There was really no choice.

It was a duty; it must be done.

After a time, they fell silent, and he listened to the soft hiss of the static on the air-to-ground loop.

And eventually, after much debate and protest, official permission was granted to proceed with the mission.

First, Arkady had to change the plane of the orbit of his Soyuz.

At present, the orbit was a ground-hugging circle, angled at some twenty-five degrees to the Moon’s equator, a shallow tilt. Now, Arkady needed a ground track that would take him over the Moon’s South Pole. So his orbit must be tipped up at a more jaunty angle, eighty degrees or more, so that he looped over both poles.

Steering a spacecraft to a new orbit was not a question of turning a wheel, like a car. The Soyuz’s main propulsion system would have to burn at an angle to its present velocity vector, gradually pushing it sideways, like a tug hauling at a supertanker.

The velocity changes required were well within the capabilities of Soyuz with its Block-D booster — which was, after all, capable of returning him all the way from lunar orbit and to the Earth — and it was a neat exercise in three-dimensional orbital mechanics, which Arkady conducted in conjunction with the ground, to calculate the rocket burns required.

But the manoeuvre would absorb most of the fuel reserve put aside for the return of Soyuz to the Earth, whether Arkady proceeded with the landing or not.

And so it was that when Arkady felt the gentle push of the propulsion system at his back, he knew he was, already, committed.

Arkady allowed himself a complete orbit, in his new polar orientation, before he began his descent.

As he passed over the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon, he spoke to Geena.

…Are you lonely up there? Do you miss me?

“Yes,” said Arkady. Yes. But I cannot tell you how much. Not when the whole world, including your ex-husband, is listening in. “I even miss Baikonur.”

Baikonur? The steppe?

“The steppe has its beauty. At this time of year the grass and flowers have burned off, and the steppe has turned grey, save for the green of the camel thorn and the pale pink of the saxifrage flowers. Sometimes after the rain, puddles form, like little lakes, in the middle of the salty desert. Swans come to breed there!…”

It sounds beautiful.

“It can be.”

Now, unexpectedly, Geena sang a song for him. Her voice was hesitant, not very tuneful, her Russian accent poor. But he recognized it immediately. It was a favourite from his childhood, On the Porch Together. Her voice was nervous and thin, reduced to a scratch by the radio loop, and it all but reduced him to tears. She had learned this song from his family, and had now brought it to the Moon for him. And she was filling his heart. Most Americans could never understand the importance of such simple human moments.

And when she was done, Geena sang one of Yuri Gagarin’s favourites — so it was said, anyhow — called I Love You, Life. All the cosmonauts knew this one, and he joined in, but his voice was weak and he feared he would lose control.

At last, without warning, he sailed around the rocky limb of the Moon, and the radio signal turned to mush, cutting short her song.

He turned off the receiver, and drifted away into the empty, ticking cabin.

In solitude once more, Arkady watched the shadows lengthen, and, for the last time, he sailed into the shadow of the Moon.

It was necessary for his craft now to perform the final burn. As so often happened with the key events of this mission, it seemed, it must be done here, in the radio shadow of the Moon, when he was alone and out of touch with the Earth.

But if it must be, it must be.

He ensured that all the loose equipment in the craft was stowed away. Then he swam through to the descent module and sealed shut the hatch behind him.

He climbed into his pressure suit. He fixed his gloves and helmet in place. He made to close his visor.

He paused.

He clasped his hands on his lap, closed his eyes, and intoned, “Help us, God.” It was just as if his family was with him, here in the sphere of the Moon. Then he straightened up to begin his work.

He closed his helmet, and settled into the contoured couch at the centre of the descent module. He pulled his restraints around his body, adjusted them, and locked them in place.

Now, he need only wait for the computer to count down to the final burn.

Arkady sailed over the Moon’s North Pole. The flat sunlight picked up particles swimming along with the Soyuz — flakes of paint or insulation — and if he banged his fist on the wall a whole shoal of them would be born. They seemed to sparkle as they moved away from Soyuz, but some of them floated nearby, as if tracking a current through water.

Three, two, one.

There was no noise. Not even a vibration. Just a gentle, steady, push in the back.

Good engineering, he thought.

Soon it was over.

He had lost velocity, and the orbit of the Soyuz had become an ellipse. As he sailed around the Moon, he would come gradually lower, until — as he approached the South Pole, all of halfway around the Moon — he would reach his new orbit’s lowest point, which would graze the surface itself.

So he was committed. His only regret was that he would die alone, without so much as touching another human being again.

But then he would not be alone, on the Moon. Geena was there.

In the dark, the attitude system fired. He could hear the hollow rumble of the vernier rockets, like somebody dragging a chain across the hull of the ship. The Soyuz was automatically turning itself around, for it must come down nose-first. Through his portholes he could see flashes, a pinkish spray of particles from the reaction control nozzles, like sparks from a fire.

And then he flew into sunlight, without warning, as he had every two hours since entering this lunar orbit. As the light flooded over him, and the sun’s heat sank into the fabric of the ship, making the hull tick and expand, he felt a surge of renewal, of rebirth. He basked in the light, like a cat on a zavalinka, the earthen wall of a peasant’s house.

Coupled by the emergency hoses like Siamese twins, moving awkwardly, clumsily, constantly fearful of breaking their contact, ever aware of the way their time on the Moon’s surface was diminishing…

Thus, Henry and Geena laboured to collapse their shelter, their only home on the Moon, and to load up the old Apollo Rover with their survival gear.

When they were done the Rover was piled high with equipment. The collapsed shelter, a big pie-dish, was tied to the back by nylon rope.

“Like something out of The Beverly Hillbillies,” said Henry.

“I always hated that show.”

They clambered onto the Rover, and Geena pushed at the joystick.

The Rover lumbered forward.

It was a rocking and rolling ride, all the way to the rille complex. Every time it hit a mound or a depression or a crater rim — which was every few seconds — the Rover teetered precariously, obviously top-heavy.

Geena followed yesterday’s tracks, but today they rolled right past the point where they’d parked.

They approached the rim of a side rille, much smaller than Schröter’s Valley.

“That’s it,” Henry said. “Pull over.” Henry got out of the Rover even before they stopped, but his hoses yanked him back, and he tumbled back into his seat.

She rapped his helmet. “Do not do that again, asshole.”

“Sorry.”

They went through the complex and embarrassing ballet of getting themselves, as a joined pair, off the Rover.

Together, they walked to the rille. Geena held Henry’s hand, to ensure they didn’t separate too far. She couldn’t feel his hand, inside the thickness of his glove. It was difficult to Moonwalk, joined like this; they had to synchronize their loping.

The rille was small — only twenty or thirty yards wide, its walls deep-cut. Henry had picked it out from old low-orbit Apollo photographs. In the low sunlight, with the regolith’s tan sparkle, its eroded walls looked like a small mountain valley, she thought, somewhere above the snow line.

“There,” said Henry. He pointed along the rille. “You see that?”

She looked where he pointed. A few hundred yards along, the rille terminated; but she could see a kind of bridge of rock beneath which the valley continued, as if it entered a tunnel.

“What is it?”

“A lava tube. Our salvation. I knew there had to be one here. Maybe we can live through this after all. Come on. We haven’t much time.”

This was Henry’s latest plan. She thought it was crazy. But she had to admit, now she’d slept on it, the idea of sacrificing her life without trying was less appealing than ever.

So, with Geena clinging on to Henry’s hand, watching they didn’t foul the tubing that joined them, they loped back to the Rover and began to unload it.

He fell inexorably from the empty lunar sky, every minute dropping five thousand feet and covering sixty more miles, the shadows lengthening as he rounded the curve of the Moon.

He must fly down the visible face of the Moon, all the way to the south, before landing. His altitude would drop steadily, sixty miles, forty, twenty, ten. He imagined his trajectory unwinding, a smooth curve shaped by gravity, kissing the surface of the Moon at just the point he intended, fifty miles short of the place he intended to deliver his nuclear weapon.

He was still flying at orbital speed — three thousand miles per hour, about Mach Five — and he would keep up those speeds, accelerate in fact, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Nobody in history had ever flown so fast, so low, not even Geena.

Certainly nobody had tried to achieve a touchdown at such speeds. And yet that was what he must attempt, today.

Through the tight portholes of his Soyuz, he caught glimpses of the surface of the Moon. It was a spotlit bombing range under a black sky, fleeing under his prow, fresh craters and basin rim mountains and undulating mare plains crowding over the close horizon with an unwelcome eagerness.

His view was completely sharp, of course. There was no cloud, no layer of muddy air, to obscure his view; and at times he would lose his sense of altitude. At such moments he turned away from the windows and trusted to his instruments, his infallible electronic senses, and to the precise mathematics that had guided him here.

And now, as Arkady flew further south, a new series of mountains — a ring of them, folded and eroded — came shouldering over the horizon towards him. They straddled the Moon, as if striving to block his further progress towards the Pole.

This was, he knew, the mountainous rim of the great South Pole-Aitken Basin: the huge impact crater which straddled the South Pole of the Moon, the largest and deepest such crater in the whole of the Solar System, a walled plain as wide as the Mediterranean Sea.

His Soyuz, like a little green bug, flew over the immense, eroded shoulders of the rim mountains. The mountains stretched before him and to either side, obviously ancient, colourless as plaster-of-paris models, a five-thousand-mile-long ring of shattered and folded Moonscape.

He checked his clock. Fourteen minutes to his touchdown. He was still seventy-five thousand feet high, with almost a quarter of the Moon’s face still to traverse; yet he was already inside the great Basin.

The land beyond the rim walls was revealed now. It was battered and scarred even beyond the norm he had come to expect for this small, ancient, rocky world, every square inch of it crowded with craters and rubble. The biggest craters here were major complexes in themselves, huge and eroded, many miles across, their giant flanks punctured by smaller, brighter newcomers.

In the shadows of the mountain ring, there were places where the sun could not have shone for a billion years — perhaps the coldest places, Arkady thought, in the Solar System.

It was there that Henry predicted water droplets from Moon-smashed comets would collect, snowing once into the shadows, and forever lying still. And it was there that Arkady must descend.

Ten minutes left. Fifty thousand feet: as high as he had flown, above Earth, before his first flight as a cosmonaut. And still he dropped, five thousand feet per minute, his descent as steady as ageing, and the fleeing Moon rose to meet him, as inexorable as death itself.

His controllers at Korolyov were silent. There was, it seemed, nothing more to say.

And now, as the land fled beneath him, at last — for the first time, and utterly unwelcome — he felt the brush of fear.

The lava tube was maybe ten yards wide. Its entrance was strewn with rubble, evidently cracked off of the roof. When she shone her helmet lamp into its depths, it extended further than her beam could reach.

“Good grief,” she said. “It’s long.”

Henry was moving into the tube, stepping carefully over the rubble-strewn floor, pulling their shared hoses behind him. To Geena, he was just a silhouette before the elliptical puddle of light cast by his helmet lamp.

She was forced to follow, reluctantly.

She was spooked by this place.

Of course she was being illogical. There could be nothing here to hurt her, not so much as a lunar rat. Nothing, in fact, had walked here since the tube’s formation, perhaps a billion years ago.

But even so…

“Look how sharp the rocks are,” Henry said. “No meteorite weathering here. Watch your step, Geena; this stuff could cut your suit to ribbons.”

“And you watch out for the damn hosepipe.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, the tube is bigger than I expected.”

“Well, this is the Moon. The last time I was in a lava tube was Hawaii. A couple of miles long… The lava on the Moon flows much more freely. That’s why you have the maria, great frozen puddles of the stuff. This tube might be ten miles long, maybe more.”

“Henry, help me with this damn shelter. If we don’t recharge our packs in the next couple of minutes, we’re screwed anyhow.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Henry. He loped across to work with her.

When they had the shelter set up, they crawled inside.

They sat there in their EVA suits, fully pressurized, within their grimy inflatable shelter, sheltered by the rille lava tube, talking by torchlight.

Geena said, “How long before we see anything?”

“Maybe three hours after the detonation. The math is chancy.”

“That’s a long time to wait.”

“Not so long.”

“Tell me a story, Henry.”

“I don’t know any stories.”

“Tell me this is going to work. How much water is there at the South Pole?”

“I don’t know for sure. But the Moon is old, Geena. Enough time for a lot of volatiles to collect in the cold traps, where the sun never shines. Water and carbon dioxide. My models suggest there might be the equivalent of a thousandth the mass of a large cometary impactor, delivered by one process or another.”

“I’ll give you your thousandth,” she said. “So what?”

“Geena, a thousandth of a comet — if you melted it — could cover the Moon in water to a depth of a metre or so. A thousandth of a comet would contain enough carbon dioxide to form an atmosphere.”

The fans of her suit whirred patiently. She was sitting on a folded-up blanket, her suit stiff; now she came a little closer to him, as if seeking the human warmth trapped inside the layers of his suit. “So how come Prospector detected so little?”

“Because it’s logical. A working-out of the laws of physics. Solar System processes. It has to be there hidden in the deep regolith.”

“Right. And your nuke is going to melt it all.”

“Oh, no.” He sounded surprised. “Don’t you get it? To melt all that ice would take the energy of…” He thought about it. “Maybe ten times Earth’s whole nuclear arsenal.”

“So how is the bunker-buster going to work?”

She could hear the grin in his voice. “Judo.”

Suddenly, she felt weary. She just wanted done with all of this, all these schemes and plans, one way or the other.

She closed her eyes.

“You’ve got to be a believer,” he whispered gently.

Arkady checked the controls set out before him. There were instruments and switches for the main systems, a TV screen, and an optical orientation view-finder set up on a small porthole next to the panel; there were orientation controls on his right, and manoeuvring controls to his left. His small laptop, with its weapons controls, was fixed to the couch to his right.

For the nuclear device, he had rigged a simple dead man’s switch. If possible, he would set the timer after a careful emplacement. But if power was lost, the device would detonate anyway.

His craft was prepared, and the weapons it carried.

He closed his hands around the joysticks that controlled the spacecraft’s systems. There was no computer program to control what he was going to attempt, with this poor Soyuz; he must lead it perhaps to its destruction himself.

He was ready.

Two minutes left. Just ten thousand feet now. The Moon ground fled beneath him, flattening, bellying up towards him.

His descent was actually very shallow — just ninety feet in every mile, much shallower than even a civilian airliner. His path, in fact, was almost tangential to the Moon’s surface. But his speed was gigantic. The pocked ground fled beneath him, like a scarred runway in the last few feet of a descent.

One minute.

Five thousand feet up, and he was still sixty miles from his goal.

The land seemed to flatten further, the close horizon receding.

And then he flew past the flank of a round-shouldered lunar mountain, grey, pock-marked. Its shadowed far side was limned by a graceful, powdery curve of sunlit regolith, and its summit was lost above him.

As soon as he perceived the mountain, it was gone, lost behind him, as unreachable as his childhood.

Twenty seconds. Less than two thousand feet. The craters ahead were foreshortened to ellipses, pools of shadow in the sunlight, flattening.

He flew into shadow, and he could see no more.

And so, in darkness, Arkady — still moving at a mile a second, sitting up in his couch — hit the surface of the Moon.

Arkady’s life, the success of his mission, was utterly dependent on Henry’s theories.

At the moment of touchdown — the instant at which the rounded belly of the Soyuz impacted the lunar dirt — two things happened.

First, the attitude thrusters beneath Arkady’s feet fired on full strength, lifting Soyuz away from the regolith. The thrust was sufficient to hold eighty per cent of the Soyuz’s weight up from the surface; the actual depth of contact ought to be no more than a few inches. Other thrusters fired intermittently, to keep the craft upright, stop it tumbling.

Second, the Star Wars laser fired from the craft’s nose.

If this South Pole crater was indeed a frozen lake of water, dusted over by regolith, then the laser should blast-melt a shallow furrow, a canal of glowing steam, utterly straight ahead of Arkady. The liquid water — persisting for a few seconds before boiling away — would lubricate the ferocious contact between the hull of the Soyuz and the ancient ice.

The Soyuz would shed its orbital speed in friction with the water, and — sliding home like a baseball player coming to a plate — would come to a gentle halt, with barely any fuel expended.

That, at any rate, was the theory.

A hundred seconds and it would be over, one way or another.

Arkady was thrust forward against his chest restraints. The impact was violent, spine-jarring, harder than he expected.

The Soyuz groaned like a tin can. The craft rattled and jumped, as if some giant were battering its hull, the vibration so violent he could no longer see the instruments. The deceleration should be less than one and a half G, but it was a long time since he had been on Earth, and it was in any case the vibration that was shaking him to pieces.

…But the craft held. The cabin lights flickered, but stayed bright.

The pressure, the noise and vibration, continued. He struggled to stay upright, to keep breathing. His ribs ached, and there was a greying around the rim of his vision.

He heard a series of jolts and bangs: that was the solar panel wings, the optical sighting system periscope, perhaps the rendezvous antenna on its stand, being ripped off the hull. His craft was being stripped down to its basics by this brutal passage.

In the first ten seconds, hardly any of his velocity gone, he covered ten miles, scouring across the Moon’s shadowed surface.

But the seconds wore on, his heart continued to beat, and the structure of the craft was still holding. He allowed himself a grin. This rattling Soyuz was a tank, ploughing resolutely through the lunar ice; the Americans” tin-foil Apollo would not have lasted a dozen yards!

He caught glimpses of the Moon, fleeing past his window: dune fields lit up by a red, spectral glow, obscured by sprays of steam. The glow was his own, he realized: it was the hull of his Soyuz and the dirt of the Moon, turned red hot by his spectacular arrival.

He must be a wonderful sight, raising parabolic plumes of glowing spray and steam to either side, as he cut his geometrically straight line across the surface of the Moon. If the Moon were tipped up a little more, in fact, on Earth they would even be able to see, with the naked eye, the gash he must cut in the surface.

Twenty seconds, seventeen miles covered; thirty seconds, twenty-four miles…

His velocity was dropping, then, almost as planned. Yet the ride grew no less violent, the shuddering dips and bangs of the craft no less pronounced. Sometimes the bangs were very severe, as the Soyuz hit some inhomogeneity in the ice.

Suddenly the deceleration increased, and he was thrown with fresh vigour against the restraint straps. But he had been expecting that; as his velocity reduced the Soyuz was sinking more deeply into the lunar ice, digging in, braking him more rapidly.

Now a full minute had elapsed since that first jarring touchdown, and, by God, he was still breathing. Just ten miles to go, and his speed must be no more than Mach Two, and falling…

He had of course broken all land-speed records in the process of this landing. And, whatever the outcome, he would become the first human to die on another planet, the first to create a myth on this world without history, without monuments. Let them engrave that on the statue they would build to him, on Leninski Prospect!

Seventy seconds, eighty; forty-five miles, forty-seven. The shuddering of the craft, the howling of the metal scraping on poorly-lubricated ice, all of it seemed to him to be smoothing out and reducing. The vibration now was much diminished, and he was even able to read his instruments.

Ninety seconds. Another lurch, a plummet downwards, another savage bite of deceleration.

Now the attitude thrusters had cut out, and he would complete his final glide unpowered, the Soyuz ploughing ever deeper into the ice of the Moon.

Ten more seconds. The Soyuz slowed in violent lurches, and Arkady was still pinned forward against his straps. But he felt exultant. It had worked, by God! His speed was now no more than a couple of hundred miles per hour, and he began to believe, cautiously, that he might actually live through this. He would be a Russian cosmonaut, alive on the Moon, even if for just a few minutes or hours… It would be glorious!

As its speed dwindled, the Soyuz dipped forward, and it started to slew sideways, as if skidding across an icy runway. The cloud of steam that had obscured the front rendezvous port cleared, and Arkady, for the first time, was able to see ahead.

And, he saw, there was something in his way.

It was a sheer cliff face; perhaps it was even the central mountain of the South Pole crater, or a foothill of it. So big, whatever it was, it filled half the universe.

Disappointment surged, overwhelming his fear.

He reached out to the laptop. He held his gloved finger over the destruct button he had configured.

He allowed himself a moment’s sweet regret at this misfortune, for it was a beautiful plan, and it had worked, all but this final detail.

He thought of Lusia, and Vitalik, and Geena.

Near enough.

He pushed the button, and he brought the light of the stars to the shadows of the Moon.

6

Watch the Moon.

It was as if the message ran around the battered planet.

Watch the Moon. The satellite shone down on its parent, as it always had; but now the air of Earth was murky with ash and smoke, its night side glowing bright with fires and volcanism, the infernal light of Earth bright enough to banish the Moon glow…

Watch the Moon.

That was what Henry had told Jane to do, in the last message she got from him, via NASA.

It was 4.00 a.m., nearly dawn, when she woke Jack. They dressed quickly, and went to stand in the middle of the lawn, at the rear of this rental house in Houston, that Henry had fixed up for them. Snow crunched under their feet: snow like Moon dust, snow in late Texas summer.

Jack walked silently, withdrawn. But that was okay. All he had seen in the last few weeks was going to take some silent time to take in, and she was determined he was going to get that time; even if she couldn’t give him anything else but that.

The weather was shot to pieces around the planet, but this August cold snap was unprecedented, it seemed. But the air was still laden with moisture, a damp ghost of summer humidity, so much clear ice had collected everywhere.

Ice whiskers had clustered together to make a carpet as thick as snow on the roads and structures. The drivers on the freeways were very cautious, and seemed to be baffled by such phenomena as ice on their windscreens. De-icer seemed unknown here; Jane felt a little contemptuous, like a Swede mocking British attempts to cope with a few measly inches of snow. The roads were gritted, but with what looked like beach sand. The bridges on the freeways were iced up, pretty deadly, and the traffic was crawling and scared. It was easy to skid as you came off the freeway around those right-angle turns.

She had thought they were safe when they arrived here, at the house Henry had set up for them. Well, maybe they were. But there were power outages that lasted days. The TV had images of plucky Houstoners loading frozen hamburgers onto their summer barbecues… News Lite, the cynics called it.

Anyhow she knew they would have to move soon, Henry’s protection notwithstanding. The Administration was preparing to remove ration privileges for aliens. But Jane knew where she would take Jack: north, into Canada, to the centre of the Shield. The most stable rocks in the continent…

It was a clear night, with only a trace of sunset pink staining the horizon. And the Moon, in the tall Texan sky, was almost full, a dish of light mottled by grey, just as it had always been.

She had brought a small telescope, a child’s toy. She lifted it now.

Jane looked to the upper left corner of the Moon, where Henry had told her he would be, at Aristarchus. It was impossible to comprehend that the Moon was a globe-shaped planet in the sky, that Henry was standing there, perhaps looking back at her.

She clutched Jack, hoping the sky stayed clear of clouds and ash.

Henry was walking on the surface of the Moon.

The Earth was low in the south, God’s blue eyeball in the sky, now lidded by darkness. Maybe Jane was up there, watching, thinking about him.

When he stood in the shadow of the rille wall, he could see stars.

He walked over the undulating ground, through quiet, in the soft rain of starlight.

Geena kept calling the Moon a dead world. She was wrong. It wasn’t dead. It was a world of rocks, of rock flowers and rock forests and rock colours, a subtle, still, Zen-like beauty that would take a lifetime to explore.

The Moon as a giant Zen rock garden. Blue Ishiguro would have enjoyed that thought.

It was true that the Moon was a quiet world. There wasn’t even the brush of wind, the crash of a remote wave. It was a quiet that had persisted for billions of years, since the end of the heavy bombardment that had shaped the landscape. Even the light here was old, the light of the stars that had taken centuries or millennia to reach here.

But there was change here. There was even weather.

There was frost, on the Moon.

The Moon had an atmosphere, of hydrogen, helium, neon and argon. It was so thin it was probably replenished by the solar wind. At night, the argon would freeze out. It sublimated quickly at dawn.

Now, walking in shadows disturbed only by milky blue Earth-light, here and there, he convinced himself he could see a sparkle, a glint of lunar ice…

He was encased in stars, surfing on rocky blue waves.

He could feel the regolith crunch beneath his feet, his weight crushing the floury structure constructed by a billion years of micrometeorite gardening. All that information, lost as soon as he touched it.

And now, there was no time left to decode it.

If Henry had got his math right, soon this place — like every site on the Moon — would be overwhelmed by weather.

Henry knew he should be anticipating the great events to come. If it worked — if — he would be giving humanity, perhaps, a whole new world.

If the Moon was the only safe world in the Solar System, because of the Moonseed hive at its core, humans were going to have to come here to live. Henry’s plan would — might — make that possible.

But Henry was a geologist. He might be creating a new Earth, but he was going to have to wreck the Moon to do it. For instance, the structure of the ice at the Pole, strata laid down over billions of years, was a record of the impact history of the inner Solar System — a unique record that was probably already lost, thanks to the nuke.

He would destroy the Moon, to save humanity. Grandiose bullshit.

Somehow, he had manoeuvred himself into a situation where the history of two worlds was resting on his shoulders. As if he was Jesus Christ himself.

But he had no pretensions; this was no part of the deal as far as his life plan was concerned.

Especially as Christ died for his mission, as he might have to now.

He checked the watch clumsily strapped to his dust-grimed sleeve.

Watch the Moon…

Jays Malone climbed up Mount Wilson to do just that. He came with Sixt Guth, who was not much younger than him, now grounded from the Space Station. Everybody was grounded now, it seemed.

The old observatory stood two thousand yards above Los Angeles. The city’s lights flowed in rectangular waves about the foot of the hill, washing out the horizon with a salmon-pink glow; but the sky above was crisp and cool and peppered with stars.

The opened dome curved over Jays’s head, a shell of ribbing and panels that looked like the inside of an oil tank. The dome, with its brass fixtures and giant gears, smelled vaguely of old concrete. The telescope itself was an open frame, vaguely cylindrical, looming in the dark.

Sixt had taken one of his several doctorates, in astronomy, at UCLA, and had put in some observational work on this “scope. Now, his old contacts had made the place available for Sixt and his buddy, on this night of all nights.

Sixt was fussing around the telescope. “This is the Hooker telescope,” he said. “When it was built, in 1906, it was the largest telescope in the world… Kind of ironic.”

Jays had a pair of Air Force binoculars around his neck, big and powerful. He lifted them to the Moon, squinting through the aperture in the dome.

“What’s ironic?”

“The use of that bunker-buster.”

“The what? Oh, the bomb on the Moon.”

“Those conventional earthquake bombs they used in the Gulf War were too good. So the pariah states started buying up deep excavation equipment, to escape the bombs, and bury their command posts and their nuclear and chemical and biological stockpiles…”

Jays stared at the old Moon until the muscles at the edges of his eyes started to ache. He didn’t know what to expect, tonight. Would the changes on the Moon be visible at all, from a quarter-million miles? Would it be over in the blink of an eye?

“…The B61-11 is like a nuclear dum-dum bullet,” Sixt was saying. “It directs most of its damage straight down into the ground, towards the bunker. It can do as much damage in that way as an H-bomb. So it’s a nuclear weapon with a role for which conventional weapons are useless. It blurs the line between conventional and nuclear war.” He laughed. “Saddam’s super-bunkers probably never existed anyhow. Do you remember Doctor Strangelove? We managed to get ourselves into a deep-mining arms race…”

“What?” Jays looked at him vaguely, a little dazzled by Moonlight; he’d heard maybe one word in three. “What are you talking about?”

And so, he missed the moment of detonation.

…And Henry thought he felt the shock of the detonation: the gentlest of tremors transmitted through the layers of his suit, waves in the rock, passing through the silent heart of the Moon, from an explosion the planet’s width away.

He should get back to the shelter in the lava tube. He turned and loped over the regolith, rock flour deposited by billions of years of meteorites, lunar ground never broken by a human footstep before.

The shock wave from the bunker-buster punched down into the strata of ice and dust, crushing the ancient layers, and slammed into the bedrock crust beneath. A central ball was flashed to vapour, which strove to flee the explosion. Surrounding layers of dirty ice were smashed and crushed, and the cavity expanded, growing at last to a hundred yards across.

When the stellar energy of the initial explosion faded, the weight of the layers above bore down on the cavity. It caved in, and layers of rubble collapsed down into it and over each other, forming a deep rubble chimney four hundred yards tall. It was surrounded by a fracture zone, cracks racing outwards, and its base was lined with radioactive glass, the remnants of the rock dust layers.

When the chimney collapse reached the surface, volatiles — water and carbon dioxide steam — began to fount from the growing crater. It was a volcano, of water and air…

Jane had found too many symptoms to ignore, now. Changes in her bowel habits. Blood in her stools and urine; pain when she pissed. Sores in her mouth that wouldn’t heal; hoarseness and coughs and difficulty swallowing; bleeding between her normal periods. It was as if she had wished this illness on herself, and now it was coming true.

She knew she would have to face it, go find a doctor. But that would confirm what she feared. It would be like picking up the revolver to play Russian Roulette—

“I can see it,” Jack said. “I can see it. Wow.”

Jane lifted the toy telescope. The Moon leapt into detail, the craters at the terminator finely detailed by shadow, her view obscured only by the trembling of her hands and by the false-colour spectral rings of the cheap lens.

She’d almost missed the flash, the few seconds after ignition: the moment when fire touched the surface of the Moon, shining over the southern limb, brought there by human hands. Already that glow was fading. But she could see the consequences.

There was a cloud, of yellow-white vapour, which fountained up — it must have been tens of miles high to be visible from here — erupting from the limb of the Moon into the darkness of space, in slow snakes, fingers of gas.

Henry was right: there was ice at the Pole, and here was the proof of it.

The soft white glow fell back, already much brighter than the Moon’s native glow, splashing against the Moon’s grey surface, and racing over that barren ground.

For a moment she felt a stab of regret. What harm had the Moon ever done humanity? For billions of years it had patiently regulated the tides, drawing up the sap in oceans and plants and humans. It was inspiration for a million myths, maybe more bad love songs, and dreams of flight.

And now, just a few decades after humans first reached it, we’ve visibly wounded it, she thought. Whatever the outcome of all this in human terms, it must be a tragedy for the Moon.

But some of the vapour was dissipating, great wisps of it branching away from the Moon. Perhaps it was escaping from the Moon’s gravity well altogether.

Maybe the new atmosphere wouldn’t stick.

She watched anxiously as the flower of steam blossomed on the surface of the Moon.

Now Sixt was using the Air Force glasses. “Oh, my God,” he kept saying. “Oh, my God.” Over and over.

Jays sat down in a rickety old chair that had once, it seemed, belonged to Edwin P. Hubble, who had used this telescope to observe distant galaxies, and so figure out that the universe is expanding. Jays craned his head back, and pressed his eye to the cylindrical eyepiece.

It took him a few moments to figure out how to see. He had to keep one eye closed, of course, and even then he had to align his head correctly, or his view would be occluded by the rim of the eyepiece.

A gibbous disc floated into his view. It was a washed-out grey with a splash of white at one part of the edge.

It was, of course, the Moon.

And he could see the vapour fountaining from its invisible source on the Moon’s far side. Some of it was escaping the Moon’s gravity. But most of it was falling back to the surface, and creeping sluggishly over the face of the Moon.

Right now, the vapour formed a loose cap, sitting over the South Pole region. It was growing, but with almost imperceptible slowness. It was like watching a mould spread across a smear of nutrient in a petri dish.

But it wasn’t growing uniformly. It seemed to be pooling, in the deeper craters and valleys incised into the Moon, before flooding on. In fact, it seemed to be flowing generally north-east — into the mouth of the Man in the Moon — avoiding the brighter area in the south-west corner of the visible face.

He knew the reason for that. The brighter area was the lunar highlands, older and higher than the grey areas, the lava-flooded maria. The volatiles Meacher had liberated were pouring over the Moon’s surface like fog, seeking out the low points, the crater pits and the valleys, the lava seas that flooded the great basins.

In a deep mare to the south — that must be Mare Nubium, he thought — he could almost see the surge of the air as it flowed, a bowl of atmosphere sloshing against eroded rim mountains like dishwater; and at the leading edges of the flood there were waves, hundred-mile crests distinctly visible, reflecting back from the basin’s walls like ripples in a bathtub, moving with a slug-like slowness.

It was, he thought, the first stirring of a new geography.

The cap of steam was much brighter, area for area, than the native surface of the Moon, which was starting to look drab by comparison. Earth’s reflective clouds of water vapour made it one of the brightest objects in the Solar System. And already, with maybe twenty per cent of the Moon’s surface covered, the Moon was much brighter than before…

He looked away from the eyepiece. He was slightly dazzled. When he looked down, the shadow of his liver-spotted hands against his shirt was much sharper than before.

Sixt was staring up at the Moon, its new light shining on his bare scalp. “My God,” he said. “You guys going up there, hopping around for three days, that was something. But now we’re changing the face of the Solar System. My God.”

Jays found he was trembling. Lights in the sky. He wanted to cower, hide like a dog under Edwin Hubble’s chair.

Henry — restless, excited — walked until he came to a rise, which he climbed in a few loping paces, and looked south.

The undulating lunar surface stretched away before him, its surface shaped by fractal crater layers into a frozen rocky sea. The sun was to his left — the east, for even after all that had happened it was still morning on the Moon — and he could feel the touch of its heat, through the thick layers of his suit. And the Earth was before him, a blue crescent: it was an old Earth, its phase locked in opposition to the new Moon’s. He imagined human faces all over that night side, turned up towards him, watching the Moon.

The sky above was still black, unmarked by the great events which ought to be occurring on the other side of the planet.

Ought to be.

All those volatiles were going to spread around the curve of the Moon.

How quickly?

The leading edge, spreading into vacuum, would diffuse as rapidly as molecules moved at such temperatures — say, a thousand miles an hour. Enough to cloak the Moon in cloud, from pole to pole, in three or four hours.

That was his theory, such as it was.

He was looking south, away from the Aristarchus Complex, over the extent of the Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms. The way it would come.

The released vapour, like heavy fog, would rush into the low-lying areas first. It would have to flow around the big bright block of the lunar highlands to the south, the Apennine and Altai Mountains, and then gush down into the lower-lying maria. Much of the left-hand side of the visible face of the Moon, as seen from Earth, was pocked with grey maria, including the place he was standing now, on the invisible line between Procellarum and the Mare Imbrium. The volatiles would just gush across these immense grey plains, as the thin basalt lava had once flowed, a billion years before. Maybe, he thought, the new weather was going to reach him sooner than he expected.

It was indeed a judo trick.

His single bomb, no matter how precisely delivered, could never have melted enough of the putative volatiles at the Poles to make a difference. There hadn’t been enough energy in the nuke to melt more than that initial hundred-yard spherical chamber in the dust. But his intention was to achieve more than that: much more.

To melt all the volatiles he believed were locked at the South Pole would need something of the order of a billion times the energy released by his nuke. One hell of a feedback factor.

But the energy he needed was there: superstring energy, locked up in the inert Moonseed, which permeated the aluminum-rich rock that was the crust of the Moon.

Henry had modelled it over and over.

Elsewhere on the Moon, there was no evidence of Moonseed in the upper layers of the regolith. Presumably the action of sunlight had long ago activated whatever was there to activate; only shadowed rocks, like 86047, retained infection. And deeper in, the Witch in the Well had suppressed any chain reaction that might have led to the disassembly of the Moon.

The gamma-ray flash from the nuke would, he figured, start a chain reaction in the deep-buried Moonseed. It would be activated in the upper layers of the crust, to a sufficient depth that there would be enough energy released to melt his volatiles — so he figured — before the chain-reaction reached the deeper crust layers and was suppressed by the Witch.

So he figured. His lack of data, particularly on the suppression mechanism, was a little worrying.

He looked at the black, inert horizon. Nothing might happen at all. Or, he might just have destroyed the Moon. I’ll settle for anything in between…

It was a little spooky, in fact, the way the Moonseed had configured itself to offer him this mechanism. A lever, with which to move a planet.

Terraforming the Moon would have been possible without this bizarre partnership with the Moonseed, and it had been Henry’s vision — what he had hoped to prove with Shoemaker — that the Moon had sufficient resources one day to become a true sister planet to Earth.

They could have done it anyhow. But it would take a long time before humans could assemble the energy required. Centuries, even millennia.

The Moonseed infestation seemed curiously designed. It was as if it was meant to be like this. The Alfred Synge cosmic conspiracy theory.

Maybe he was being foolish, to be out in the open at a time like this. Or maybe he wasn’t. Who could tell? Nobody had sat through a terraforming before. Maybe nobody ever would get the chance again…

But now there was something in the sky.

He raised his gold sun-visor. The unwavering sun beamed in on him, shining in his eyes like a spotlight. But he masked his eyes with his gloved hands, holding them over his plexiglass visor, in a tunnel before his eyes. He stared out, letting his eyes dark-adapt once more.

Gradually, the stars came out for him, over the Ocean of Storms.

But those pinpoint lights were flickering, he saw: for the first time since the last of its internal atmosphere was lost to space, the stars in the Moon’s sky were twinkling.

There was air up there.

The old surface, where it was still exposed, was looking dingy grey by comparison with the glowing mask of cloud; and that diminishing cap was crowded, even as Jays watched, by the rippling ring of cloud that closed around it.

It must almost have reached Meacher and Bourne, he thought. They would see it any time now.

He envied them. Christ, to be there now…

“I knew it from the moment I picked up that damn rock,” he said.

“Knew what?” Sixt asked, sounding puzzled.

“That there was something in that rock.” And he told Sixt about the dust pool he’d seen on the Moon, the way his purloined fragment of bedrock had glowed in the sun.

Sixt said, “You knew? Christ, man, if you’d said something—”

“We might have avoided all this?” Jays shrugged. “Maybe. But if I’d reported something as crazy as that, they wouldn’t have let me fly again. What would you have done?”

Sixt mulled it over. “What you did. I guess you shouldn’t blame yourself. The damn thing is a planetary plague. It would have gotten here anyhow.”

“The irony is I never flew again anyhow. Maybe there is a just God. What do you think?”

The Moon glowed in the sky, already as bright as a new sun; even the darkened crescent to its western limb was clearly visible. It was almost featureless, so bright was it now; but Jays thought he could make out a bright triangle in the south-east — the old highland area, poking above much of the new atmosphere — and perhaps dim shadows of the old maria. Here and there on the new, bland face of the Moon, he could see the crackle of lightning: gigantic storms which must have straddled hundreds of miles, with lightning leaping between clouds, illuminating them from beneath, as if the planet’s surface itself was cracking.

Some vapour hung away from the Moon, in a thin cloud, trails of it hovering over the South Pole. The Moon floated within its wreath of air, like a huge lantern. And he thought he could see structure in that escaped cloud: shadows cast upward by the new, brighter Moonlight. Maybe those escaped volatiles would ultimately form some kind of ring—

The ground lurched. The telescope seemed to come alive, and the eyepiece ground into his eye socket, and he fell.

He was on his back, in the ruins of Hubble’s chair.

He’d heard a cracking sound. Maybe it was the dome. Or maybe it was the bones of his skull.

He couldn’t see too well. That eye, poked by the eyepiece, didn’t seem to be functioning at all. There was no pain, though.

Here was Sixt, hovering over him, his face a blurry Moon shape.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Sixt said. “My God. Your eye.”

Sixt tried to lift him to his feet. Jays had never felt so old.

“Can you see?”

“Not so well,” he said. But he didn’t think it would matter, very much longer.

The ground quivered again, and he heard a metallic crash, as some piece of equipment or other came shearing off its mount.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Richter seven? Eight?”

“It’s the fucking San Andreas,” Sixt said. “Half of Los Angeles is on fire. A hell of a view…”

“The San Andreas,” Jays said. “It took its own sweet time to join the party.”

“We have to get out of here.”

“And,” said Jays calmly, “go where, exactly?”

“Jays—”

“Can you still see the Moon?”

“Yes. Yes, Jays, I see the Moon.”

“Then tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what’s happening up there.”

At least, he thought, I got to see this. This and Aristarchus: maybe that’s enough, for one lifetime.

But he wished he’d had a chance to say goodbye to Tracy and the boys.

And so the old astronaut sat in the ruins of the observatory dome, trying to ignore the mounting pain from his smashed eye socket, listening as his friend described the waves of light travelling across the Moon, until the fires from the city filled the air with smoke, hiding the Moon, and began to close in on them for the last time, and the next shock hit them, even more violent than the last—

They woke up Monica to see it.

You’ve got to watch the Moon.

Not live, of course; she couldn’t be moved. But they gave her a little TV, set up on a table over her bed, tipped so she could see it.

Circles closing in.

In the end it was the liver disease that was getting her. Nausea, loss of appetite, drastic weight loss; her skin had turned yellow and itched like all hell. She had turned into a giant, misshapen, irritable cantaloupe. But at that it was preferable to going crazy first, which had been another option.

…There had come a day when she could not get herself out of her chair unaided, and a day when she knew she would never see another spring, and at last, maybe soon, there would be a day which would be the final day of all for her, a day without a sunset, or a night without a dawn. The circles would close in, walling her off from this world of books and music and mathematics and sunlight, everything she knew and cherished. And on the other side of the wall was nothing she could understand or anticipate, perhaps — probably — not even her identity. Even now her universe was reduced to this poky little hospital room, the last flowers Alfred Synge had sent her before he got himself killed in the Seattle event… Now, I won’t even get to see the outside air again.

Watch the Moon…

A disc, floating in the screen, obscured somewhat by the volcanic ash in the air: it was recognizably the Moon, still, the familiar layout of seas and highlands easy to make out. But now there was cloud pooling in the lowlands. What looked like auroras, lightning.

Henry Meacher, she thought. So he did it. Hot damn.

She felt a surge of satisfaction, banishing for a few minutes the coldness that seemed to cluster around her the whole day now. I knew I was right to back him. I knew he had something.

She watched the clouds, swirling across the face of the Moon. Damn, damn, I wish I could see it for real. Just for a moment.

But she knew that was impossible.

…And now it came crowding over the horizon, as suddenly as that, a thick, crawling layer of fog, spreading towards him like, he thought irrelevantly, a dry ice layer at a 1980s rock concert. It spread right around the curving horizon, and stretched to a wispy thinness above.

Incredible, he thought; he was still standing in vacuum, but he was looking at a layer of atmosphere, from the outside. He could see how turbulent it was: wherever it touched the ground, two hundred degrees hot, it was soaking up rock heat and boiling afresh.

On the Moon’s dark side — in shadow — it would be different. There, the ground was two hundred below freezing; there, over the high cratered plains of farside, good God, it must already be snowing.

The turbulent gas was picking up dust. That stuff could be a problem if it scoured at the seams of his suit.

But it advanced towards him ferociously, turning into a towering tsunami of gas and steam and dust, coming at him at a thousand miles an hour — more than the speed of sound, back on Earth.

He had time to look down, once more, at the ancient, complex surface of the regolith, his own boot print there, as sharp as Armstrong’s.

Geena is going to kill me for not being in the shelter, he thought. But he couldn’t have missed this.

The new air was white, and as tall as the sky.

Then it was on him, a wall of vapour sweeping over him.

It hit him harder than he’d expected, like a fire hose battering him from head to foot, a wall of rushing steam… Sound, on the Moon: he could hear the howling of this primordial wind across the plain, around his suit, the first sound in four billion years. The dust at his feet fled towards the vacuum, tiny dunes piling up over his blue Moon boots. There was a continual patter, almost like rain; it was probably pebble-sized fragments of regolith, trying to smash through his helmet. He tried to lift his arms, to protect his face, but he couldn’t.

He fell backwards.

He bounced on Geena’s backpack and rolled sideways, and skidded a few feet over the surface. He tried to shield the control panel of his suit, protect the backpack itself; but he was just scrabbling in the dirt like an animal, helpless before this planetary violence. And it was hot, Jesus, but after all he was in a jet of live steam.

He looked up. There was structure to the air already, he saw: the thick, ground-level fog, clearer air above, and, masking the vanishing remnants of black sky, some high, racing cirrus clouds: not billowing, just banner-like streamers. Perhaps they were ice crystals.

The air closed over him, like fog.

There were waves in the still-tenuous gas encasing him — huge density waves pulsing past him — and his vision periodically cleared, affording him glimpses of the sky.

The sun seemed shrunken and remote, reduced to a pale disc in a milky sky. There was the old Earth. The disc of shadowed world cradled within the arms of the crescent was clearly visible, illuminated more brightly by the Moonlight than he had seen it before. He thought, in fact, he could make out the shape of continents, Africa and west Asia and Europe, and the soft bowling-ball glow, where the Moonlight shone over the Indian Ocean.

It wasn’t such a surprise; the Earth was entitled to be lit up like a Christmas bauble on a tree. For it had a brand new Moon, a Moon that had never been so bright before…

But now clouds closed over the sky.

Earth was gone. He was encased in a glowing fog, sealed under a lid of cloud.

The wind was dying. He was still buffeted by gusts — he imagined the air scouring in great currents over this huge lava plain, the new lands it had conquered, seeking equilibrium — but it wasn’t as violent as before.

And he was still breathing. He could hear, above the diminishing battering of the breeze, the steady hiss of his oxygen supply. Good NASA engineering, conservative to the last.

He tried to stand up.

Jane put down the toy telescope.

The naked-eye Moon was bright: brighter than Jane had ever known it, as bright as if the sun had exploded. It cast a sharp shadow behind her, and the sky, masking the stars, was a deep, lustrous blue she’d never seen before: the new Moonlight, scattered by Earth’s ash-laden air. And the great lantern hanging in the sky shed enough light for her to pick out the details of the landscape, the coast, the sparkling waves. There were colours, she realized: colours by Moonlight.

Actually, it was unearthly.

The very light seemed unnatural: neither full daylight, nor night, nor Moonlight. And the Moon continued to evolve in the sky, a crawling, sparking thing. The Moon wasn’t supposed to change…

But it was wonderful.

Jack’s face, upturned, was shining in the new light. He was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks, the moisture sparkling.

She could hear sounds: dogs barking, birds, the rustle of insects.

The animals think it’s daylight, she realized. It was the opposite of an eclipse. She wondered how long it would take them to adapt to the new world in the sky, to throw off all that evolution.

She shivered.

She could hear people cheering. Clapping, from gardens and patios all over the neighbourhood.

Now there were flashes around the cloud-covered pole of the Moon: sparks, urgent flappings of yellow light, sparking, dying, reforming like trick candles. They were auroras. Lightning strikes. The first storms.

Weather, on the Moon.

She imagined faces all over the darkened hemisphere of the planet, in shattered homes and refugee camps, turned up to the new Moon, which hung in the sky bright as a sun: a symbol of hope, inchoate yet, but nevertheless real. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. For the first time in many days, her soul was lifted above her own concerns, her fears for Jack.

She lifted the telescope again, but now her own vision was blurred with tears.

His suit bent at the waist, comparatively easily. The suit was still pressurized, above ambient — but now there was air out there, not just vacuum; he wasn’t a starfish any more.

It was hard to see out of his gold sun-visor, though. It had been scoured and starred comprehensively by that first wave of fragments. But when he raised it, his helmet remained clear.

There was a soft sound, a gentle tap, on his helmet. Another on his shoulder. And his chest.

The pattering came more steadily now. And when he looked around he could see new craters being dug into the battered regolith, little pits a couple of inches wide, all around him.

He tipped back and raised his face to the hidden sky.

Raindrops, falling towards his face.

It wasn’t like rain on Earth. This was Moon rain.

The biggest drops were blobs of liquid a half-inch across. They came down surrounded by a mist of much smaller drops. The drops fell slowly, perhaps five or six feet in a second. The drops were big flattened Frisbees of liquid, flattened out by air resistance. They caught the murky light, shimmering.

When the drops hit his visor, they impacted with a fat, liquid noise; their splash was slow and languid. The drops spread out rapidly, or else collapsed into many smaller, more compact droplets over the plexiglass.

He stood up. He stood in Moon rain, the first for five billion years, wishing it could go on forever.

He leaned forward, compensating for the mass of his pack, and looked down. As it hit the ground, each raindrop broke up into many smaller drops, which trickled rapidly into the regolith, turning it to mud.