Space

The Gaijin had a somewhat mathematical philosophy. Malenfant thought it sounded suspiciously like a religion.

The Gaijin believed that the universe was fundamentally comprehensible by creatures like themselves — like humans, like Malenfant. That is, they believed it possible that an entity could exist that could comprehend the entire universe, arbitrarily well.

And they had a further principle that mandated that if such a being could exist, it must exist.

The catch was that they believed there was a manifold of possible universes, of which this was only one. So She may not exist in this universe.

It — She — was the final goal of the Gaijin’s quest.

But until the God of the Manifold shows up, there’s only us, Malenfant thought. And there is work to do. We have to fix the bugs in this universe we’re all stuck in. Hence, we throw a net around a star.

Hence, my sacrifice.

But, almost from the beginning, we fought back. We barely understood a damn thing, and nothing we did alone was going to make a difference, and the whole time we were swept along by historical forces that we could barely understand, let alone control, much as it had always been. We didn’t even know who the bad guys were. But, by God, we tried.

At whatever cost to ourselves.

Chapter 18 Moon Rain

There were only minutes left before the comet hit the Moon.

“You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! Believe me, I’ve been there. Look around you, pal. You guys have lasted a hundred and fifty years up here, in your greenhouses and your mole holes. A hell of an achievement. But the Moon can’t support you…”

Xenia Makarova had a window seat, and she gazed out of the fat, round portholes. Below the shuttle’s hull she could see the landing pad, a plain of glass microwaved into lunar soil, here on the edge of the green domes of the Copernicus Triangle. And beyond that lay the native soil of the Moon, just subtle shades of gray, softly molded by a billion years of meteorite rain.

And bathed, for today, in comet light.

Xenia knew that Frank J. Paulis thought this day, this year 2190, was the most significant in the history of the inhabited Moon, let alone his own career. And here he was now, a pile of softscreens on his lap, hectoring the bemused-looking Lunar Japanese in the seat alongside him, even as the pilot of this cramped, dusty evacuation shuttle went through her countdown check.

Xenia had listened to Frank talk before. She’d been listening to him, in fact, for 15 years, or 150, depending on what account you took of Albert Einstein.

“…You know what the most common mineral is on the Moon? Feldspar. And you know what you can make out of that? Scouring powder. Big fucking deal. On the Moon, you have to bake the air out of the rock. Sure, you can make other stuff, rocket fuel and glass. But there’s no water, or nitrogen, or carbon—”

The Japanese, a businessman type, said, “There are traces in the regolith.”

“Yeah, traces, put there by the Sun, and it’s being sold off anyhow, by Nishizaki Heavy Industries, to the Gaijin. Bleeding the Moon even drier…”

A child was crying. The shuttle was just a cylinder-shaped cargo scow, hastily adapted to support this temporary evacuation. It was crammed with people, last-minute refugees, men and women and tall, skinny children, subdued and serious, in rows of canvas bucket seats like factory chickens.

And all of them were Lunar Japanese, save for Frank and Xenia, who were American; for, while Frank and Xenia had taken a time-dilated 150-year jaunt to the stars — and while America had disintegrated — the Lunar Japanese had been quietly colonizing the Moon.

“You need volatiles,” Frank said now. “That’s the key to the future. But now that Earth has fallen apart nobody is resupplying. You’re just pumping around the same old shit.” He laughed. “Literally, in fact. I give you another hundred years, tops. Look around. You’ve already got rationing, strict birth control laws.”

“There is no argument with the fact of—”

“How much do you need? I’ll tell you. Enough to future-proof the Moon.”

“And you believe the comets can supply the volatiles we need for this.”

“Believe? That’s what Project Prometheus is for. The random impact today, which alone will deliver a trillion tons of water, is a piece of luck. It’s going to make my case for me, pal. And when we start purposefully harvesting the comets, those big fat babies out in the Oort cloud—”

“Ah.” The Lunar Japanese was smiling. “And the person who has control of those comet volatiles—”

“That person could buy the Moon.” Frank reached for a cigar, a twentieth-century habit long frustrated. “But that’s incidental…”

But Xenia knew that Frank was lying about the comets, and their role in the Moon’s future. Even before this comet hit the Moon, Project Prometheus was already dead.

A month ago, Frank had called her into his office.

He’d had his feet up on his desk and was reading, on a softscreen, some long, text-heavy academic paper about deep-implanted volatiles on the Earth. She had tried to talk to him about work in progress, but he patently wasn’t interested. Nor was he progressing Prometheus, his main project.

He had gotten straight to the point. “The comet is history, babe.”

At first she hadn’t understood. “I thought it was going to supply us all with volatiles. I thought it was going to be the demonstration we needed that Prometheus was a sound investment.”

“Yeah. But it doesn’t pan out.” Frank had tapped the surface of his desk, which lit up with numbers, graphics. “Look at the analysis. We’ll get some volatiles, but most of the nucleus’s mass will be blasted back to space. Comets are spectacular fireworks, but they are inefficient cargo trucks. However you steer the damn things down, most of the incoming material is lost. I figure now you’d need around a thousand impactors to future-proof the Moon fully, to give it a stable atmosphere, thick enough to persist over significant periods before leaking away. And we aren’t going to get a thousand impactors, not with the fucking Gaijin everywhere.” He had looked thoughtful, briefly. “One thing, though. Did you know the Moon is going to get an atmosphere out of this? It will last a thousand years—”

“Iroonda.”

“No, it’s true. Thin, but an atmosphere, of comet mist. Happens every time a comet hits. Carbon dioxide and water and stuff. How about that.” He shook his head. “Anyhow it’s no use to us.”

“Frank, how come nobody figured this out before? How come nobody questioned your projections?”

“Well, they did.” He had grinned. “You know I’m never too sympathetic when people tell me something is impossible. I figured there would be time to fix it, to find a way.”

This was, on the face of it, a disaster, Xenia knew. Project Prometheus had gotten as far as designs for methane rockets, which could have pushed Oort comets out of their long, slow, distant orbits and brought them in to the Moon. The project had consumed all Frank’s energies for years, and cost a fortune. He needed investors, and had hoped this chance comet impact, a proof of concept, would bring them in.

And now, it appeared, it had all been for nothing.

“Frank, I’m sorry.”

He seemed puzzled. “Huh? Why?”

“If comets are the only source of volatiles—”

“Yesterday I thought they were. But look at this.” He had tapped his softscreen and was talking fast, excited, enthusiastic, his mind evidently racing. “There’s a woman here who thinks there are all the volatiles you could want, a hundred times over, right here on the Moon. Can you believe that?”

“That’s impossible. Everyone knows the Moon is dry as a bone.”

He had smiled. “That’s what everyone thinks. I want you to find this woman for me. The author of the paper.”

“Frank—”

“And find out about mining.”

“Mining?”

“The deeper the better.” His grin widened. “How would you like a journey to the center of the Moon, baby?”

And that was how she had first learned about Frank’s new project, his new obsession, his latest way to fix the future.

Ten seconds. Five. Three, two, one.

Stillness, for a fraction of a second. Then there was a clatter of explosive bolts, a muffled bang.

Xenia was ascending as if in some crowded elevator, pressed back in her bucket seat by maybe a full g. Beyond her window, stray dust streaked away across the pad glass, heaping up against fuel trucks and pipelines.

But then the shuttle swiveled sharply, twisting her around through a brisk ninety degrees. She heard people gasp, children laugh. The shuttle twisted again, and again, its attitude thrusters banging. This lunar shuttle was small, light, crude. Like the old Apollo landers, it had a single fixed rocket engine that was driving the ascent, and it was fitted with attitude control jets at every corner to turn it and control its trajectory. Just point, twist, squirt, as if she were a cartoon character carried into the air by hanging onto an out-of-control water hose.

Three hundred meters high the shuttle swiveled again, and she found she was pitched forward, looking down at the lunar surface, over which she skimmed. They were rising out of lunar night, and the shadowed land was dark, lit here and there by the lights of human installations, captured stars on dark rock. She felt as if she were falling, as if the ascent engine was going to drive her straight down into the unforgiving rocks. Sunrise. Wham.

It was not like Earth’s slow-fade dawn; the limb of the Sun just pushed above the Moon’s rocky horizon, instantly banishing the stars into the darkness of a black sky. Light spilled on the unfolding landscape below, fingers of light interspersed with inky black shadows hundreds of kilometers long, the deeper craters still pools of darkness. The Moon could never be called beautiful — it was too damaged for that — but it had a compelling wildness.

But everywhere she could see the work of humans: the unmistakable tracks of tractors, smooth lines snaking over the regolith, and occasional orange tents that marked the position of emergency supply dumps, all of it overlaid by the glittering silver wires of mass driver rails.

The shuttle climbed farther. The Lunar Japanese around her applauded the smooth launch.

Now Earth rose. It looked as blue and beautiful as when she and Frank had left for the stars. But it had changed, of course. Even from here, she could see Gaijin flower-ships circling the planet, the giant ramscoops of the alien craft visible as tiny discs. She felt a stab of antique resentment at those powerful, silent visitors who had watched as humanity tore itself apart.

And now, as the shuttle tilted and settled into its two-hour orbit around the Moon, Xenia saw a sight she knew no human had ever seen before today:

Comet rise, over the Moon.

The coma, a diffuse mass of gas and fine particles, was a ball as big as the Earth, so close now it walled off half the sky, a glare of lacy, diffuse light. Massive clumps in the coma, backlit, cast shadows across the smoky gases, straight lines thousands of kilometers long radiating at her. The comet was coming out of the Sun, straight toward the Moon at seventy thousand kilometers an hour. She looked for the nucleus, a billion-ton ball of ice and rock. But it was too small and remote, even now, a few minutes from impact. And the tail was invisible from here, fleeing behind her, running ahead of the comet and stretching far beyond the Moon, reaching halfway to Mars in fact.

Suddenly there was light all around the shuttle. The little ship had plunged inside the coma. It was like being inside a diffuse, luminous fog.

“Vileekee bokh.”

Frank leaned across her, trying to see. He was seventy years old, physiological; his nose was a misshapen mass of flesh. He was a small, stocky man, with thick legs and big prizefighter muscles built for Earth’s gravity, so that he always looked like some restless, half-evolved ape alongside the tall, slim Lunar Japanese.

“Eta prikrasna,” Xenia murmured.

“Beautiful. Yeah. How about that: we’re the last off the Moon.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “There’s a handful of old nuts who won’t move, no matter what.”

“Even for a comet?”

“Takomi. He’s still there, for one,” she said.

“Who?”

“He’s notorious.”

“I don’t read the funny papers,” Frank snapped.

“Takomi is the hermit out in the ruins of Edo, on Farside. Evidently he lives off the land. He won’t even respond to radio calls.”

Frank frowned. “This is the fucking Moon. How does he live off the land? By sucking oxygen out of the rock?…”

The light changed. There was a soft Fourth-of-July gasp from the people crammed into the shuttle.

The comet had struck the Moon.

A dome of blinding white light rose like a new Sun from the surface of the Moon: comet material turned to plasma, mixed with shattered rock. Xenia thought she could see a wave passing through the Moon’s rocky hide: a sluggish ripple in rock turned to powder, gathering and slowing.

Now, spreading out over the Moon’s dusty gray surface, she saw a faint wash of light. It seemed to pool in the deeper maria and craters, flowing down the contours of the land like a morning mist on Earth. It was air: gases from the shattered comet, an evanescent atmosphere pooling on the Moon.

And, in a deep, shadowed crater, at the ghostly touch of the air, she saw light flare.

It was only a hint, a momentary splinter at the corner of her eye. She craned to see. Perhaps there was a denser knot of smoke or gas, there on the floor of the crater; perhaps there was a streak, a kind of contrail, reaching out through the temporary comet atmosphere.

It must be some by-product of the impact. But it looked as if somebody had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

Already the contrail had dispersed in the thin, billowing comet air.

People were applauding again, at the beauty of the spectacle, with relief at being alive. Frank wasn’t even watching.

It was only after they landed that it was announced that the comet nucleus had landed plumb on top of the Fracastorius Crater dome.

Fracastorius, on the rim of the Sea of Nectar, was one of the largest settlements away from the primary Copernicus-Landsberg-Kepler triangle. The Lunar Japanese grieved. The loss of life was small, but the economic and social damage huge — perhaps unrecoverable, in these straitened times, as the Moon’s people tried to adapt to life without their centuries-old umbilical to Earth’s rich resources.

Frank Paulis seemed unconcerned. He got back to work, even before the shuttle landed. And he expected Xenia to do the same.

Xenia and Frank had spent a year of their lives on a Gaijin flower-ship, had submitted themselves to the unknown hazards of several Saddle Point gateway teleport transitions, and had gotten themselves relativistically stranded in an unanticipated future. On their way home from the Saddle Point radius, Frank and Xenia had grown concerned when nobody in the inner system answered their hails. At last they had tapped into some low-bit-rate news feeds.

The news had seemed remarkably bad.

Earth had fallen into a state of civil war. There were battles raging around the equatorial region, the Sahara and Brazil and the Far East. Frank and Xenia had listened, bemused, to reports laced with names they’d never heard of, of campaigns and battles, of generals and presidents and even emperors. Even the nations involved seemed to have changed, split and coalesced. It was hard even to figure out what they were fighting over — save the generic, the diminishing resources of a declining planet.

One thing was for sure. All their money was gone, disappeared into electronic mist. They had landed on the Moon as paupers, figuratively naked.

It turned out to be a crowded Moon, owned by other people. But they had nowhere else to go. And, even on the Moon, nobody was interested in star travelers and their tales.

Frank had felt cheated. Going to the stars had been a big mistake for him. He’d gone looking for opportunity; he’d grown impatient with the slow collapse of Earth’s economy and social structure, even before the wars began, long before people started dying in large numbers.

Not that he hadn’t prospered here.

The Moon of the late twenty-second century, as it turned out, had a lot in common with early twenty-first century Earth. Deprived of its lifelines from the home world, the Moon was full: a stagnant, closed economy. But Frank had seen all this before, and he knew that economic truth was strange in such circumstances. For instance, Frank had quickly made a lot of money out of reengineering an old technology that made use of lunar sulphur and oxygen as a fuel source. As the scarcity of materials increased, industrial processes that had once been abandoned as unprofitable suddenly became worthwhile.

Within five years Frank J. Paulis had become one of the hundred wealthiest individuals on the Moon, taking Xenia right along with him.

But it wasn’t enough. Frank found it impossible to break into the long-lived, close-knit business alliances of the Lunar Japanese. And besides, Xenia suspected, he felt cooped up here on the Moon.

Anyhow, that was why this comet had been so important for Frank. It would shake everything up, he said. Change the equation.

It was either admirable, she thought, or schizophrenic.

After all these years — during which time she had been his companion, lover, employee, amateur therapist — Xenia still didn’t understand Frank; she freely admitted it. He was an out-and-out capitalist, no doubt about that. But every gram of his huge ambition was constantly turned on the most gigantic of projects. The future of a world! The destiny of mankind! What Xenia couldn’t work out was whether Frank was a visionary who used capitalism to achieve his goals — or just a capitalist after all, sublimating his greed and ambition.

But, swept along by his energy and ambition, she found it hard to focus on such questions.

Bathed in blue-water light, pacing his stage, Frank J. Paulis was a solid ball of terrestrial energy and aggression, out of place on the small, delicate Moon. “You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! I believed that before I went to the stars, and I believe it now. I’m here to tell you how…”

To launch his new project, Frank, feverish with enthusiasm, had hired the Grand Auditorium, the heart of Landsberg. The crater’s dome was a blue ceiling above Xenia, a thick double sheet of quasiglass, cable-stayed by engineered spiderweb, filled with water. The water shielded Landsberg’s inhabitants from radiation and served to scatter the raw sunlight. During the long lunar day, here in Landsberg, the sky was royal blue and full of fish: goldfish and carp. After five years, Xenia still couldn’t get used to it.

Frank was standing before a huge three-dimensional cartoon, a Moon globe sliced open to reveal arid, uninteresting geological layers. Beside him sat Mariko Kashiwazaki, the young academic type whose paper had fired Frank off in this new direction. She looked slim and uncertain in the expensive new suit Frank had bought for her.

Xenia was sitting at the back of the audience, watching rows of cool faces: politicians, business types. They were impassive. Well, they were here, and they were listening, and that was all Frank cared about right now.

“Here on the Moon, we need volatiles,” Frank was saying. “Not just to survive, but to expand. To grow, economically. Water. Hydrogen. Helium. Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Maybe nitrates and phosphates to supplement the bio cycles.

“But the Moon is deficient in every essential of life. A molecule of water, out there on the surface, lasts a few hours before it’s broken up by the sunlight and lost forever. The Moon’s atmosphere is so thin some of the molecules are actually in orbit. Frankly, it’s no damn use.”

It was true. All this had been well known from the moment the first Apollo astronaut had picked up the first lump of unprepossessing Moon rock and found it dry as a bone — drier, in fact.

For a time there had been hope that deep, shadowed craters near the Moon’s poles might serve as stores for water ice, brought there by cometary impacts. But to the intense disappointment of some dreamers, no more than a trace of such ice had been found. As the Fracastorius impact had demonstrated, such impacts deposited little volatile material anyhow. And even if any ice was trapped it wouldn’t be there forever; the Moon’s axis turned out to be unstable, and the Moon tipped this way and that over a period of hundreds of millions of years — a long time, but short enough that no crater remained in shadow forever.

Dry or not, Moon rock wasn’t useless. In fact, it was about 40 percent oxygen by weight. There were other useful elements: silicon, which could be used to make glass, fiberglass, polymers; aluminum, magnesium, and titanium for machinery, cables, coatings; chromium and magnesium for metal alloys.

But Frank was essentially right. If a mine on Earth had turned up the highest-grade lunar ore, you’d throw it out as slag.

And that was why Frank had initiated Project Prometheus, his scheme for importing volatiles and spinning up the Moon by hitting it with a series of comets or asteroids. But it hadn’t worked.

“So where do we turn next?” He eyed his audience, as always in command, even before these wary, slightly bemused Lunar Japanese. “Believe me, we need to find something. The Moon, your Moon, is dying. We didn’t come to the Moon so our children could live in a box. We came to live as humans, with freedom and dignity.” He threw back his arms and breathed the recycled air. “Let me tell you my dream. One day, before I die, I want to throw open the damn doors and walk out of the dome. And I want to breathe the air of the Moon. The air we put there.” He began to pace back and forth, like a preacher — or a huckster. “I want to see a terraformed Moon. I want to see a Moon where breathable air blankets the planet, where there is so much water the deep maria will become the seas they were named for, where plants and trees grow out in the open, and every crater will glisten with a circular lake… It’s a dream. Maybe I won’t live to see it all. But I know it’s the only way forward for us. Only a world — stable, with deep biological reservoirs of water and carbon and air — is going to be big enough to sustain human life, here on the Moon, over the coming centuries, the millennia. Hell, we’re here for the long haul, people, and we got to learn to think that way. Because nobody is going to help us — not Earth, not the Gaijin. None of them care if we live or die. We’re stuck in this trench, in the middle of the battleground, and we have to help ourselves.

“But to make the Moon a twin of Earth we’ll need volatiles, principally water. The Moon has no volatiles, and so we must import them. Correct?”

Now he leaned forward, intimidating, a crude but effective trick, Xenia thought dryly.

“Dead wrong. I’m here today to offer you a new paradigm. I’m here to tell you that the Moon itself is rich in volatiles, almost unimaginably so, enough to sustain us and our families, hell, for millennia. And, incidentally, to make us rich as Croesus in the process…”

It was the climax, the punch line, Frank’s big shock. But there was barely a flicker of interest in the audience, Xenia saw. Three centuries and a planetary relocation hadn’t changed the Japanese much, and cultural barriers hadn’t dropped; they were still suspicious of the noisy foreigner who stood before them, breaking into the subtle alliances and protocols that ruled their lives.

Frank stood back. “Tell ’em, Mariko.”

The slim Lunar Japanese scientist got up, evidently nervous, and bowed deeply to the audience.

Earth-Moon and the other planets, Mariko said, supported by smooth softscreen images, had condensed, almost five billion years ago, from a swirling cloud of dust and gases. That primordial cloud had been rich in volatiles: 3 percent of it was water, for instance. You could tell that was so from the composition of asteroids, which were leftover fragments of the cloud.

But there was an anomaly. All the water on Earth, in the oceans and atmosphere and the ice sheets, added to less than a tenth of that 3-percent fraction. Where had the rest of the water gone?

Conventional wisdom held that it had been baked out by the intense heat of Earth’s formation. But Mariko believed much of it was still there, that water and other volatiles were trapped deep within the Earth: perhaps four hundred kilometers down, deep in the mantle. The water wouldn’t be present as a series of immense buried oceans. Rather it would be scattered as droplets, some as small as a single molecule, trapped inside crystal lattices of the minerals with names like wadsleyite and hydrous-D. These special forms could trap water within their structure, essentially exploiting the high pressure to overcome the tendency of the rising temperature to bake the water out.

Some estimates said there should be as much as five times as much water buried within the Earth as in all its oceans and atmosphere and ice caps.

And what was true of Earth might be true of the Moon.

According to Mariko, the Moon was mostly made of material like Earth’s mantle. This was because the Moon was believed to have been budded off the Earth itself, ripped loose after a giant primordial collision popularly called the “big whack.” The Moon was smaller than the Earth, cooler and more rigid, so that the center of the Moon was analogous to the Earth’s mantle layers a few hundred kilometers deep. And it was precisely at such depths, on Earth, that you found such water-bearing minerals…

Frank watched his audience like a hawk.

His cartoon Moon globe suddenly lit up. The onion-skin geological layers were supplemented by a vivid blue ocean, lapping in unlikely fashion at the center of the Moon. Xenia smiled. It was typical Frank: inaccurate, but compelling.

“Listen up,” he said. “What if Mariko is right? What if even one tenth of one percent of the Moon’s mass by weight is water? That’s the same order as five percent of Earth’s surface water. A hidden ocean indeed.

“And that’s not all. Where there is water there will be other volatiles: carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, even hydrocarbons. All we have to do is go down there and find it.

“And it’s ours. We don’t own the sky; with the Gaijin around, maybe humans never will. But we inhabitants of the Moon do own the rocks beneath our feet.

“Folks, I’m calling this new enterprise Roughneck. If you want to know why, go look up the word. I’m asking you to invest in me. Sure it’s a risk. But if it works it’s a way past the resource bottleneck we’re facing, here on the Moon. And it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He grinned. “There’s a fucking ocean down there, folks, and it’s time to go skinnydipping.”

There was a frozen silence, which Frank milked expertly.

After the session, Xenia took a walk.

The Moon’s surface, beneath the dome, was like a park. Grass covered the ground, much of it growing out of bare lunar regolith. There was even a stand of mature palms, thirty meters tall, and a scattering of cherries. People lived in the dome’s support towers: thick central cores with platforms of lunar concrete slung from them. The lower levels were given over to factories, workshops, schools, shops, and other public places.

Far above her head, Xenia could see a little flock of schoolchildren in their white-and-black uniforms, flapping back and forth on Leonardo wings, squabbling like so many chickens. It was beautiful. But it served to remind her there were no birds here, outside pressurized cages. Birds tired too quickly in the thin air; on the Moon, against intuition, birds couldn’t fly.

Water flowed in streams and fountains and pools, moistening the air.

She passed Landsberg’s famous water-sculpture park. Water tumbled slowly from a tall fountainhead in great shimmering spheres held together by surface tension. The spheres were caught by flickering mechanical fingers, to be teased out like taffy and turned and spun into rope and transformed, briefly, into transient, beautiful sculptures, no two ever alike. It was entrancing, she admitted, a one-sixth gravity art form that would have been impossible on the Earth, and it had immediately captivated her on her arrival here. As she watched, a gaggle of children — eight or ten years old, Moon legs as long as giraffes’ — ran across the surface of the pond in the park’s basin, Jesuslike, their slapping footsteps sufficient to keep them from sinking as long as they ran fast enough.

Water was everywhere here; it did not feel dry, a shelter in a scorched desert. But overhead, huge fans turned continually, extracting every drop of moisture from the air to be cleansed, stored, and reused. She was surrounded by subtle noises: the bangs and whirrs of fans and pumps, the bubbling of aerators. And, when the children had gone, she saw tiny shimmering robots whiz through the air, fielding scattered water droplets as if catching butterflies, not letting a drop go to waste.

Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained. Landsberg was no long-term solution. The various recycling processes were extraordinarily efficient — they had gotten to the level of counting molecules — but there were always losses; the laws of thermodynamics saw to that. And there was no way to make good those losses.

It didn’t feel like a dying world. In fact it was beginning to feel like home to her, this small, delicate, slow-motion world. But the human Moon was, slowly but surely, running down. Already some of the smaller habitations had been abandoned; smaller ecospheres had been too expensive. There was rationing. Fewer children were being born than a generation ago, as humanity huddled in the remaining, shriveling lunar bubbles.

And there was nowhere else to go.

Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank’s vision, whatever his methods. At least he was fighting back: trying to find a way for humans to survive, here in the system that had birthed them. Somebody had to. It seemed clear that the aliens, the all-powerful Gaijin, weren’t here to help; they were standing by in their silent ships, witnessing as human history unfolded and Earth fell apart.

If humans couldn’t figure out how to save themselves soon, they might not have another chance.

And if Frank could make a little profit along the way to achieving that goal, she wasn’t about to begrudge him.

Well, Frank convinced enough people to get together his seedcorn investment; jubilantly, he went to work.

But getting the money turned out to be the easy part.

There never had been a true mining industry here on the Moon. All anybody had ever done was strip-mine the regolith, the shattered and desiccated outer layers of the Moon, already pulverized by meteorites and so not requiring crushing and grinding. And nobody had attempted — save for occasional science surveys — to dig any deeper than a few tens of meters.

So Frank and Xenia were forced to start from scratch, inventing afresh not just an industrial process but the human roles that went with it. They were going to need a petrophysicist and a geological engineer to figure out the most likely places they would find their imagined reservoirs of volatiles; they needed reservoir engineers and drilling engineers and production engineers for the brute work of the borehole itself; they needed construction engineers for the surface operations and support. And so on. They had to figure out job descriptions, and recruit and train to fill them as best they could.

All the equipment had to be reinvented. There was no air to convect away heat, so their equipment needed huge radiator fins. Even beneficiation — concentrating ungraded material into higher-quality ore — was difficult, as they couldn’t use traditional methods like froth flotation and gravity concentration; they had to experiment with methods based on electrostatic forces. There was of course no water — a paradox, for it turned out that most mining techniques refined over centuries on Earth depended highly on the use of water, for cooling, lubrication, the movement and separation of materials, and the solution and precipitation of metals. It was circular, a cruel trap.

They hit more problems as soon as they started to trial heavy equipment in the ultrahard vacuum that coated the Moon.

Friction was a killer. In an atmosphere, every surface accreted a thin layer of water vapor and oxides that reduced drag. But that didn’t apply here. They even suffered vacuum welds. Not only that, the ubiquitous dust — the glass-sharp remains of ancient, shattered rocks — stuck to everything it could, scouring and abrading. Stuff wore out fast on the silent surface of the Moon.

But they persisted, solving the problems, finding old references to how it had been done in the past, when the Lunar Japanese had worked more freely beyond their domed cities. They learned to build in a modular fashion, with parts that could be replaced easily by someone in a space suit. They learned to cover all their working joints with sleeves of a flexible plastic, to keep out the dust. After much experimentation they settled on a lubricant approach, coating their working surfaces with a substance the Lunar Japanese engineers called quasiglass, hard and dense and very smooth; conventional lubricants just boiled or froze off.

The work soon became all-absorbing, and Xenia found herself immersed.

The Lunar Japanese, after generations, had become used to their domes. It was hard for them even to imagine a Moon without roofs. But once committed to the project, they learned fast and were endlessly, patiently inventive in resolving problems. And it seemed to Xenia a remarkably short time from inception to the day Frank told her he had chosen his bore site.

“The widest, deepest impact crater in the fucking Solar System,” he boasted. “Nine kilometers below the datum level, all of thirteen kilometers below the rim wall peaks. Hell, just by standing at the base of that thing we’d be halfway to the core already. And the best of it is, we can buy it. Nobody has lived there since they cleaned out the last of the cold-trap ice…”

He was talking about the South Pole of the Moon.

Encased in a spiderweb pressure suit, Xenia stepped out of the hopper.

The Moon’s pole was a place of shadows. The horn of crescent Earth poked above one horizon, gaunt and ice-pale. Standing at the base of the crater called Amundsen, Xenia could actually see the Sun, a sliver of light poking through a gap in the enclosing rim mountains, casting long, stark shadows over the colorless, broken ground. She knew that if she stayed here for a monththe Moon’s glacial rotation would sweep that solar searchlight around the horizon. But the light was always flat and stark, like an endless dawn or sunset.

And at the center of Amundsen, Frank’s complex — ugly, busy, full of people — sprawled in a splash of reflected light.

Xenia had never walked on the Moon’s surface before, not once. Very few people did. Nobody was importing tungsten, and it was too precious to use on suits for sightseeing. The waste of water and air incurred in donning and doffing pressure suits was unacceptably high, and so on. On the Moon of 2190, people clung to their domed bubbles, riding sealed cars or crawling through tunnels, while the true Moon beyond their windows was as inaccessible as it had been before Apollo.

That thought — the closeness of the limits — chilled Xenia, somehow even more than the collapse of Earth. It reinforced her determination to stick with Frank, whatever her doubts about his objectives and methods.

Here came Frank in his space suit, Lunar Japanese spiderweb painted with a gaudy Stars and Stripes. “I wondered where you were,” he said.

“There was a lot of paperwork, last-minute permissions—”

“You might have missed the show.” He was edgy, nervous, restless; his gaze, inside his gold-tinted visor, swept over the desolate landscape. “Come see the rig.”

Together they loped toward the center of the complex, past Frank’s perimeter of security guards.

New Dallas, Frank’s Roughneck boomtown, was a crude cluster of buildings put together adobe-style from lunar concrete blocks. It was actually bright here, the sunlight deflected into the crater by heliostats, giant mirrors perched on the rim mountains or on impossibly tall gantries. The ’stats worked like giant floodlights, giving the town, incongruously, the feel of a floodlit sports stadium. The primary power came from sunlight too, solar panels that Frank had had plastered over the peaks of the rim mountains.

She could recognize shops, warehouses, dormitories, mess halls; there was a motor pool, with hoppers and tractors and heavy machinery clustered around fuel tanks. The inhabited buildings had been covered over for radiation-proofing by a few meters of regolith. And there was Frank’s geothermal plant, ready for operation: boxy buildings linked by fat, twisting conduits.

The ground for kilometers around was flattened and scored by footprints and vehicle tracks. It was hard to believe none of this had been here two months ago, that the only signs of human occupation then had been the shallow, abandoned strip mines in the cold traps.

And at the center of it all was the derrick itself, rising so far above the surface it caught the low sunlight — high enough, in fact, to stack up three or four joints of magnesium alloy pipe at a time. There was a pile of the pipe nearby, kilometers of it spun out of native lunar ore, the cheapest component of the whole operation. Sheds and shops sprawled around the derrick’s base, along with huge aluminum tanks and combustion engines. Mounds of rock, dug out in test bores, surrounded the derrick like a row of pyramids.

They reached the drilling floor. At its heart was the circular table through which the pipe would pass, and which would turn to force the drill into the ground. There were foundries and drums to produce and pay out cables and pipes: power conduits, fiber-optic light pipes, hollow tubes for air and water and sample retrieval.

The derrick above her was tall and silent, like the gantry for a Saturn V. Stars showed through its open, sunlit frame. And suspended there at the end of the first pipe lengths she could see the drill head itself, teeth of tungsten and diamond gleaming in the lights of the heliostats.

Frank was describing technicalities that didn’t interest her. “You know, you can’t turn a drill string more than a few kilometers long. So we have to use a downhole turbine…”

“Frank, eta ochin kraseeva. It is magnificent. Somehow, back in Landsberg, I never quite believed it was real.”

“Oh, it’s real,” Frank said tensely. “Just so long as it works.” He checked his chronometer, a softscreen patch sewn into the fabric of his suit. “It’s nearly time.”

They moved out into the public area.

Roughneck was the biggest public event on the Moon in a generation. There must have been a hundred people here: men, women, and children walking in their brightly colored surface suits and radiation ponchos or riding in little short-duration bubble rovers. These were the richest Lunar Japanese, who could still afford such luxuries. Cameras hovered everywhere. She saw virtual observers, adults and children in softscreen suits, their every sensation being fed out to the rest of the Moon.

Frank had even set up a kind of miniature theme park, with toy derricks you could climb up, and a towering roller-coaster based on an old-fashioned pithead rail — towering because you needed height, here on the Moon, to generate anything like a respectable g-force. The main attraction was Frank’s Fish Pond, a small crater he’d lined with ceramic and filled up with water. The water froze over and was steadily evaporating, of course, but water held a lot of heat, and the pond would take a long time to freeze to the bottom. In the meantime Frank had fish swimming back and forth in there, goldfish and handsome koi carp, living Earth creatures protected from the severe lunar climate by nothing more than a few meters of water, a neat symbol of his ambition.

The openness scared Xenia to death. “Are you sure it’s wise to have so many people?”

“The guards will keep out those Gray assholes.”

The Grays were a pressure group who had started to campaign against Frank, arguing it was wrong to go digging holes to the heart of the Moon, to rip out the uchujin there, the cosmic dust. They were noisy but, as far as Xenia could see, ineffective.

“Not that,” she said. “It’s so public. It’s like Disneyland.”

He grunted. “Xenia, all that’s left of Disneyland is a crater that glows in the dark. Don’t you get it? This PR stunt is essential. We’ll be lucky if we make this hole at a couple of kilometers a day. It will take fifty days just to get through the crust. We’re going to sink a hell of a lot of money into this hole in the ground before we see a red cent of profit. We need those investors on our side, for the long term. They have to be here, Xenia. They have to see this.”

“But if something goes wrong—”

“Then we’re screwed anyhow. What have we lost?”

Everything, she thought, if somebody gets killed, one of these cute Lunar Japanese five-year-olds climbing over the derrick models. But she knew Frank would have thought of that, and discounted it already, and no doubt figured out some fallback plan.

She admired such calculation, and feared it.

Frank tipped back on his heels and peered up at the sky. “Well, well,” he said. “Looks like we have an audience.”

A Gaijin flower-ship was sailing high overhead, wings spread and sparkling like some gaudy moth.

“This is ours,” Frank murmured, glaring up. “You hear me, assholes? Ours. Eat your mechanical hearts out.”

A warning tone was sounding on their headsets’ open loops now, and in silence the Lunar Japanese, adults and children alike, were lining up to watch the show. Xenia could see the drill bit descend toward the regolith, the pipe sweeping silently downward inside the framework, like a muscle moving inside a sheath of flesh.

The bit cut into the Moon.

A gush of dust sprayed up immediately from the hole, ancient regolith layers undisturbed for a billion years now thrown unceremoniously toward space. At the peak of the parabolic fountain, glassy fragments sparkled in the sunlight. But there was no air to suspend the debris, and it fell back immediately.

Within seconds the dust had coated the derrick, turning its bright paintwork gray, and was raining over the spectators like volcanic ash.

There was motion around her. People were applauding, she saw, in utter silence, joined in this moment. Maybe Frank was right to have them here, after all, right about the mythic potential of this huge challenge.

Frank was watching the drill intently. “Twenty or thirty meters,” he said.

“What?”

“The thickness of the regolith here. The dust. Then you have the megaregolith: rock crushed and shattered and dug out and mixed by the impacts. Probably twenty, thirty kilometers of that. Easy to cut through. Below that the pressure’s so high it heals any cracks. We should get to that anorthosite bedrock by the end of the first day, and then—”

She took his arm. Even through the layers of suit she could feel the tension in his muscles. “Hey. Take it easy.”

“I’m the expectant father, right?”

“Yeah.”

He took frustrated little steps back and forth. “Well, there’s nothing we can do here. Come on. Let’s get out of these Buck Rogers outfits and hit the bar.”

“All right.”

Xenia could hear the dust spattering over her helmet. And children were running, holding out their hands in the gray Moon rain, witnesses to this new marvel.

Chapter 19 Dreams of Rock and Stillness

Her world was simple: the Land below, the Dark above, the Light that flowed from the Dark. Land, Light, Dark. That, and herself.

Alone save for the Giver.

For her, all things came from the Giver. All life, in fact.

Her first memories were of the Giver, at the interface between parched Land and hot Dark. He fed her, sank rich warm moist substance into the Land, and she ate greedily. She felt her roots dig into the dry depths of the Land, seeking the nourishment that was hidden there. And she drew the thin soil into herself, nursed it with hot Light, made it part of herself.

She knew the future. She knew what would become of herself and her children.

They would wait through the long hot-cold bleakness for the brief Rains. Then they would bud, and pepper this small hard world with life, in their glorious blossoming. And she would survive the long stillness to see the Merging itself, the wonder that lay at the end of time, she and her children.

But she was the first, and the Giver had birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver.

She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.

She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

Overwhelmed by work as she was, Xenia couldn’t get the memory of the comet impact out of her head. For, in the moment of that gigantic collision she had glimpsed a contrail: for all the world as if someone, something, had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

But who, and why?

She had no opportunity to consider the question as the Roughneck project gathered pace. At last, though, she freed up two or three days from Frank, pleading exhaustion. She determined to use the time to resolve the puzzle. She went home, for the first time after many nights of sleeping at the Roughneck project office.

She took a long hot bath to soak out the gritty lunar dust from the pores of her skin. In her small tub the water sloshed like mercury. Condensation gathered on the ceiling above her, and soon huge droplets hung there suspended, like watery chandeliers. When she stood up the water clung to her skin, like a sheath; she had to scrape it loose with her fingers, depositing it carefully back in the tub. Then she took a small vacuum cleaner and captured all the loose droplets she could find, returning every scrap to the drainage system, where it would be cleansed and fed back into Landsberg’s great dome reservoirs.

Her apartment was a glass-walled cell in the great catacomb that was Landsberg. It had, in fact, once served as a genkan, a hallway, for a greater establishment in easier, less cramped times, long before she had returned from the stars; it was so small her living room doubled as a bedroom. The floor was covered with rice straw matting, though she kept a zabuton cushion for Frank Paulis. Miniature Japanese art filled the room with space and stillness.

She had been happy to accept the style of the inhabitants of this place — unlike Frank, who had turned his apartment into a shrine to Americana. It was remarkable, she thought, that the Japanese had turned out to be so well adapted to life on the Moon. It was as if thousands of years on their small, crowded islands had readied them for this greater experience, this increasing enclosure on the Moon.

She made herself some coffee — fake, of course, and not as hot as she would have liked. She tuned the walls to a favorite scene — a maple forest carpeted with bright green moss — and padded, naked, to her workstation. She sat on a tatami mat, which was unreasonably comfortable in the low gravity, and sipped her drink.

There was no indexed record of that surface rocket launch, as she had expected. There was, however, a substantial database on the state of the whole Moon at the time of the impact; every sensor the Lunar Japanese could deploy had been turned on the Moon, the events of that momentous morning.

And, after a few minutes’ search, in a spectrometer record from a low-flying satellite, she found what she wanted. There was the contrail, bright and hot, arcing through splashed cometary debris. Spectrometer results told her she was looking at the products of aluminum burning in oxygen.

So it had been real.

She widened her search farther.

Yes, she learned, aluminum could serve as a rocket fuel. It had a specific impulse of nearly three hundred seconds, in fact. Not as good as the best chemical propellant — that was hydrogen, which burned at four hundred — but serviceable. And aluminum-oxygen could even be manufactured from the lunar soil.

Yes, there were other traces of aluminum-oxygen rockets burning on the Moon that day, recorded by a variety of automated sensors. More contrails, snaking across the lunar surface, from all around the Moon. There were a dozen, all told, perhaps more in parts of the Moon not recorded in sufficient detail.

And each of these rocket burns, she found, had been initiated when the gushing comet gases reached its location.

She pulled up a virtual globe of the Moon and mapped the launch sites. They were scattered over a variety of sites: highlands and maria alike, Nearside and Farside. No apparent pattern.

Then she plotted the contrails forward, allowing them to curl around the rocky limbs of the Moon.

The tracks converged on a single Farside site: Edo. The place the hermit, Takomi, lived.

It was the first Rain of all.

Suddenly there was air here, on this still world. At first there was the merest trace, a soft comet Rain that settled, tentatively, on her broad leaves, where they lay in shade. But she drank it in greedily, before it could evaporate in the returning Light, incorporating every molecule into her structure, without waste.

With gathering confidence she captured the Rain, and the Light, and continued the slow, patient work of building her seeds and the fiery stuff that would birth them, drawn from the patient dust.

And then, suddenly, it was time.

In a single orgasmic spasm the seeds burst from her structure. She was flooded with a deep joy even as she subsided, exhausted.

The Giver was still here with her, enjoying the Rain with her, watching her blossom. She was glad of that.

And then, so soon after, there was a gusting wind, a rush of the air molecules over her damaged surfaces, as the comet drew back its substance and leapt from the Land, whole and intact, its job done. The noise of that great escape into the Dark above came to her as a great shout.

Soon after, the Giver was gone too.

But it did not matter. For, soon, she could hear the first tentative scratching of her children, carried to her like whispers through the still, hard rock, as they dug beneath the Land, seeking nourishment. There was no Giver for them, nobody to help; they were beyond her aid now. But it did not matter, for she knew they were strong, self-sufficient, resourceful.

Some would die, of course. But most would survive, digging in, waiting for the next comet Rain.

She settled back into herself, relishing the geologic pace of her thoughts. Waiting for Rain, for more comets to gather from the dirt and leap into the sky.

Xenia took an automated hopper, alone, to the Sea of Longing, on Farside. The journey was seamless, the landing imperceptible.

She donned her spiderweb suit, checked it, and stepped into the hopper’s small, extensible air lock. She waited for the hiss of escaping air, and — her heart oddly thumping — she collapsed the air lock around her and stepped onto the surface of the Moon.

A little spray of dust, ancient pulverized rock, lifted up around her feet. The sky was black — save, she saw, for the faintest wisp of white, glowing in the flat sunlight. They were ice crystals, suspended in the thin residual atmosphere of the comet impact. Cirrus clouds on the Moon: relics of the death of a comet. The mare surface was like a gentle sea, a complex of overlapping, slowly undulating curves.

And here were two cones, tall and slender, side by side, geometrically perfect. They cast long shadows in the flat sunlight. She couldn’t tell how far away they were, or how big, so devoid was this landscape of visual cues. They simply stood there, stark and anomalous.

She shivered. She walked forward, loping easily.

She came to a place where the regolith had been raked. She stopped, standing on unworked soil.

The raking had made a series of parallel ridges, each maybe six or eight centimeters tall, a few centimeters apart, a precise combing. When she looked to left or right, the raking went off to infinity, the lines sharp, their geometry perfect. And when she looked ahead, the lines receded to the horizon, as far as she could see undisturbed in their precision.

Those two cones stood, side by side, almost like termite mounds. The shallow light fell on them gracefully. She saw that the lines on the ground curved to wash around the cones, like a stream diverting around islands of geometry.

“Thank you for respecting the garden.”

She jumped at the sudden voice. She turned.

A figure was standing there — man or woman? A man, she decided, shorter and slimmer than she was. He wore a shabby, much-patched suit.

He bowed. “Sumimasen. I did not mean to startle you.”

“Takomi?”

“And you are Xenia Makarova.”

“You know that? How?”

A gentle shrug. “I am alone here, but not isolated. Only you sought and compiled information on the Moon flowers.”

“What flowers?”

He walked toward her. “This is my garden,” he said.

“A Zen garden.”

“You understand that? Good. This is a kare sansui, a waterless stream garden.”

“Are you a monk?”

“I am a gardener.”

She considered. “Even before humans came here, the Moon was already like an immense Zen garden: a garden of rock and soil.”

“You are wise.”

“Is that why you came here? Why you live alone like this?”

“Perhaps. I prefer the silence and solitude of the Moon to the bustle of the human world. You are Russian.”

“My forebears were.”

“Then you are alone here also. There are some of your people on Mars.”

“So I’m told. They won’t respond to my signals.”

“No,” he said. “They won’t speak to anybody. In the face of the Gaijin onslaught, we humans have collapsed into scattered, sullen tribes.”

Onslaught. It seemed a strange word to use, stronger than she had expected. Briefly, she was reminded of somebody else, another reclusive Japanese.

She pointed. “I understand the ridges represent flow. Are those mountains? Are they rising out of cloud, or sea? Or are they diminishing?”

“Does it matter? The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. Perhaps they are both falling and rising. You have traveled far to see me. I will give you food and drink.”

He turned and walked across the Moon. After a moment, she followed.

The abandoned lunar base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components — habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities — half buried in the cratered plain. There were robots everywhere, but they were standing silent, obviously inert.

But a single lamp burned again at the center of the old complex. Takomi lived at the heart of Edo, in what had once been, he said, a park, grown inside a cave dug in the ground. The buildings here were dark, gutted, abandoned. There was even, bizarrely, an ancient McDonald’s, stripped out, its red-and-yellow plastic signs cracked and faded. A single cherry tree grew, its leaves bright green, a splash of color against the drab gray of the fused regolith.

This had been the primary settlement established by the Japanese government, back in the twenty-first century. But Nishizaki Heavy Industries had set up in Landsberg, using the crater originally as a strip mine. Now, hollowed out, Landsberg was the capital of the Moon, and Edo, cramped and primitive, had been abandoned.

She clambered out of her suit. She had tracked in moondust. It clung to the oils of her hand and looked like pencil lead, shiny on her fingers, like graphite. It would be hard to wash out, she knew.

He brought her green tea and rice cake.

Out of his suit Takomi was a small, wizened man; he might have been sixty, but such was the state of life-extending technology it was hard to tell. His face was round, a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes were lost in leathery folds; he spoke with a wheeze, as if slightly asthmatic.

“You cherish the tree,” she said.

He smiled. “I need one friend. I regret you have missed the blossom. I am able to celebrate ichi-buzaki here. We Japanese like cherries; they represent the old Samurai view that the blossom symbolizes our lives. Beautiful, but fragile, and all too brief.”

“I don’t understand how you can live here.”

“The Moon is a whole world,” he said gently. “It can support one man.”

Takomi, she learned, used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old salvage, was slow and power-intensive, but the electrolysis process was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn’t short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.

He operated what he called a grizzly, an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same color as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight. It scraped up loose surface material and pumped out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square meters a day. Over time, the grizzly had built a solar farm covering square kilometers and producing megawatts of electric power.

“It is astonishing, Takomi.”

He cackled. “If one is modest in one’s request, the Moon is generous.”

“But even so, you lack essentials. It’s the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen—”

He smiled at her. “I admit I cheat. The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water.”

“You mine concrete?”

“It is better than paying water tax.”

“But how many humans could the Moon support this way?”

“Ah. Not many. But how many humans does the Moon need? Thus, I am entrenched.”

It struck her as another strange choice of word. There was much about this hermit she did not understand, she realized.

She asked him about the contrails she had seen, their convergence on this place. He evaded her questions and began to talk about something else.

“I conduct research, you know, of a sort. There is a science station, not far from here, which was once equipped by Nishizaki Heavy Industries. Now abandoned, of course. It is — was — an infrared study station. It was there that a Japanese researcher called Nemoto first discovered evidence of Gaijin activity in the Solar System, and so changed history.”

She wasn’t interested in Takomi’s hobby work in some old observatory. But there was something in his voice that made her keep listening.

“So you use the equipment,” she prompted.

“I watched the approach of the comet. From here, some aspects of it were apparent that were not visible from Nearside stations. The geometry of the approach orbit, for example. And something else.”

“What?”

“I saw evidence of methane burning,” he said. “Close to the nucleus.”

“Methane?”

“A jet of combustion products.”

A rocket. She saw the implications immediately. Somebody had stuck a methane rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, burned the comet’s own chemicals, to divert its course.

Away from the Moon? Or toward it?

And in either case, who?

“Why are you telling me this?”

But he would not reply, and a cold, hard lump of suspicion began to gather in her gut.

Takomi provided a bed for her: a thin mattress in an abandoned schoolhouse. Children’s paintings adorned the walls, preserved under a layer of glass. The pictures showed flowers and rocks and people, all floating in a black sky.

In the middle of the night, Frank called her. He was excited.

“It’s going better than we expected. We’re just sinking in. Anyhow the pictures are great. Smartest thing I ever did was to insist we dump the magnesium alloy piping, make the walls transparent so you can see the rocks. We have the best geologists on the Moon down that fucking well, Xenia. Seismic surveys, geochemistry, geophysics, the works. The sooner we find some ore lode to generate payback, the better…”

The Roughneck bore had passed the crust’s lower layers and was in the mantle. The mantle of the Moon: sixty kilometers deep, a place unlike any other reached by humans before.

The Moon was turning out to be much easier to deep-mine than the Earth, for it was old and silent and still. There was a temperature rise of maybe ten degrees per kilometer of depth, compared to four times as much on Earth. The pressure scaled similarly; even now Frank’s equipment was subject to only a few thousand atmospheres, less than could be replicated in the laboratory. Strangely, the density of the Moon hardly varied across its whole interior.

But Xenia knew the project had barely begun. If Frank was to find the water and other volatiles he sought, if he was to reach the conditions of temperature and pressure that would allow the water-trapping minerals to form, it could only be at enormous depths — probably beneath the rigid mantle, a thousand kilometers deep, just a few hundred kilometers from the center of the Moon itself.

She tried to ask him technical questions, about how they were planning to cope with the more extreme pressures and temperatures they would soon encounter. She knew that at first, in the impact-shattered upper regolith, he had been able to deploy comparatively primitive mechanical drilling techniques like percussion and rotary. But faced by the stubborn, hard, fine-grained rocks of the mantle, he had had to try out more advanced techniques — lasers, electric arcs, magnetic-induction techniques. Stretching the bounds of possibility.

But he wouldn’t discuss such issues.

“Xenia, it doesn’t matter. You know me. I can’t figure any machine more complicated than a screwdriver. And neither can our investors. I don’t need to know. I just have to find the right technical guys, give them a challenge they can’t resist, and point them downward.”

“Paying them peanuts the while.”

He grinned. “That’s the beauty of those vocational types. Christ, we could even get those guys to pay to work here. No, the technical stuff is piss-easy. It’s the other stuff that’s the challenge. We have to make the project appeal to more than just the fat financiers and the big corporations. Xenia, this is the greatest lunar adventure since Neil and Buzz. That party when we first made hole was just the start. I want everybody involved, and everybody paying. Now we’re in the mantle we can market the TV rights—”

“Frank, they don’t have TV any more.”

“Whatever. I want the kids involved, all those little dark-eyed kids I see flapping around the palm trees the whole time with nothing to do. I want games. Educational stuff. Clubs to join, where you pay a couple of yen for a badge and get some kind of share certificate. I want little toy derricks in cereal packets.”

“They don’t have cereal packets any more.”

He eyed her. “Work with me here, Xenia. And I want their parents paying too. Tours down the well, at least the upper levels. Xenia, for the first time the folks on this damn Moon are going to see some hint of an expansive future. A frontier, beneath their feet. They have to want it. Including the kids.” He nodded. “Especially the kids.”

“But the Grays—”

“Screw the Grays. All they have is rocks. We have the kids.”

And so on, on and on, his insect voice buzzing with plans, in the ancient stillness of Farside.

The next day Takomi walked her back to her tractor, by the Zen garden.

She had been here twenty-four hours. The Sun had dipped closer to the horizon, and the shadows were long, the land starker, more inhospitable. Comet-ice clouds glimmered high above.

“I have something for you,” Takomi said. And he handed her what looked like a sheet of glass. It was oval shaped, maybe half a meter long. Its edges were blunt, as if melted, and it was covered with bristles. Some kind of lunar geologic formation, she thought, a relic of some impact event. A cute souvenir; Frank might like it for the office.

“I have nothing to give you in return,” she said.

“Oh, you have made your okurimono already.”

“I have?”

He cackled. “Your shit and your piss. Safely in my reclamation tanks. On the Moon, shit is more precious than gold…”

He bowed, once, then turned to walk away, along the rim of his rock garden.

She was left looking at the oval of Moon glass in her hands. It looked, she thought now, rather like a flower petal.

Back at Landsberg, she gave the petal-like object to the only scientist she knew, Mariko Kashiwazaki. Mariko was exasperated; as Frank’s chief scientist she was already under immense pressure as Roughneck picked up momentum. But she agreed to pass on the puzzling fragment to a colleague, better qualified. Xenia agreed, provided she used only people in the employ of one of Frank’s companies.

Meanwhile — discreetly, from home — Xenia repeated Takomi’s work on the comet. She searched for evidence of the anomalous signature of methane burning at the nucleus. It had been picked up, but not recognized, by many sensors.

Takomi was right.

Clearly, someone had planted a rocket on the side of the comet nucleus and deflected it from its path. It was also clear that most of the burn had been on the far side of the Sun, where it would be undetected. The burn had been long enough, she estimated, to have deflected the comet, to cause its lunar crash. Undeflected, the comet would surely have sailed by the Moon, spectacular but harmless.

She then did some checks of the tangled accounts of Frank’s companies. She found places where funds had been diverted, resources secreted. A surprisingly large amount, reasonably well concealed.

She’d been cradling a suspicion since Edo. Now it was confirmed, and she felt only disappointment at the shabbiness ofthe truth.

She felt that Takomi wouldn’t reveal the existence of the rocket on the comet. He simply wasn’t engaged enough in the human world to consider it. But such was the continuing focus of attention on Fracastorius that Takomi wouldn’t be the only observer who would notice the trace of that comet-pushing rocket, follow the evidence trail.

The truth would come out.

Without making a decision on how to act on this, she went back to work with Frank.

The pressure on Xenia, on both of them, was immense and unrelenting.

After one grueling twenty-hour day, she slept with Frank. She thought it would relieve the tension, for both of them. Well, it did, for a brief oceanic moment. But then, as they rolled apart, it all came down on them again.

Frank lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, jaw muscles working, restless, tense.

Later Mariko Kashiwazaki called Xenia. Xenia took the call in her tokonoma, masking it from Frank.

Mariko had preliminary results about the glass object from Edo. “The object is constructed almost entirely of lunar surface material.”

“Almost?”

“There are also complex organics in there. We don’t know where they came from, or what they are for. There is water, too, sealed into cells within the glass. The structure itself acts as a series of lenses, which focus sunlight. Remarkably efficient. There seem to be a series of valves on the underside that draw in particles of regolith. The grains are melted, evaporated, in intense focused sunlight. It’s a pyrolysis process similar to—”

“What happens to the vaporized material?”

“There is a series of traps, leading off from each light-focusing cell. The traps are maintained at different temperatures by spicules — the fine needles protruding from the upper surface — which also, we suspect, act to deflect daytime sunlight, and conversely work as insulators during the long lunar night. In the traps, at different temperatures, various metal species condense out. The structure seems to be oriented toward collecting aluminum. There is also an oxygen trap further back.”

Aluminum and oxygen. Rocket fuel, trapped inside the glass structure, melted out of the lunar rock by the light of the Sun.

Mariko consulted notes in a softscreen. “Within this structure the organic chemicals serve many uses. A complex chemical factory appears to be at work here. There is a species of photosynthesis, for instance. There is evidence of some kind of root system, which perhaps provides the organics in the first place… But there is no source we know of. This is the Moon.” She looked confused. “You must remember I am a geologist. My contact works with biochemists and biologists, and they are extremely excited.”

Biologists? “You’d better tell me.”

“Xenia, this is essentially a vapor-phase reduction machine of staggering elegance of execution, mediated by organic chemistry. It must be an artifact. And yet it looks—”

“What?”

“As if it grew, out of the Moon ground. There are many further puzzles,” Mariko said. “For instance, the evidence of a neural network.”

“Are you saying this has some kind of a nervous system?”

Mariko shrugged. “Even if this is some simple lunar plant, why would it need a nervous system? Even, perhaps, a rudimentary awareness?” She studied Xenia. “What is this thing?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“There has been much speculation about the form life would take, here on the Moon. It could be seeded by some meteorite-impact transfer from Earth. But volatile depletion seemed an unbeatable obstacle. Where does it get its organic material? Was it from the root structure, from deep within the Moon? If so, you realize that this is confirmation of my hypotheses about the volatiles in—”

Xenia stopped. “Mariko. This isn’t to go further. News of this… discovery. Not yet. Tell your colleagues that too.”

Mariko looked shocked, as Xenia, with weary certainty, had expected. “You want to suppress this?”

That caused Xenia to hesitate. She had never thought of herself as a person who would suppress anything. But she knew, as all the star travelers had learned, that the universe was full of life: that life emerged everywhere it could — though usually, sadly, with little hope of prospering. Was it really so strange that such a stable, ancient world as the Moon should be found to harbor its own, quiet, still form of life?

Life was trivial, compared to the needs of the project.

“This isn’t science, Mariko. I don’t want anything perturbing Roughneck.”

Mariko made to protest again.

“Read your contract,” Xenia snapped. “You must do what I say.” And she cut the connection.

She returned to bed. Frank seemed to be asleep.

She had a choice to make. Not about the comet deflection issue; others would unravel that, in time. About Frank, and herself.

He fascinated her. He was a man of her own time, with a crude vigor she didn’t find among the Japanese-descended colonists of the Moon. He was the only link she had with home. The only human on the Moon who didn’t speak Japanese to her.

That, as far as she could tell, was all she felt.

In the meantime, she must consider her own morality.

Lying beside him, she made her decision. She wouldn’t betray him. As long as he needed her, she would stand with him.

But she would not save him.

Life was long, slow, unchanging.

Even her thoughts were slow.

In the timeless intervals between the comets, her growth was chthonic, her patience matching that of the rocks themselves. Slowly, slowly, she rebuilt her strength: light traps to start the long process of drawing out fire for the next seeds, leaves to catch the comet Rain that would come again.

She spoke to her children, their subtle scratching carrying to her through the still, cold rock. It was important that she taught them: how to grow, of the comet Rains to come, of the Giver at the beginning of things, the Merging at the end.

Their conversations lasted a million years.

The Rains were spectacular, but infrequent. But when they came, once or twice in every billion years, her pulse accelerated, her metabolism exploding, as she drank in the thin, temporary air and dragged the fire she needed from the rock.

And with each Rain, she birthed again, the seeds exploding from her body and scattering around the Land.

But, after that first time, she was never alone. She could feel, through the rock, the joyous pulsing of her children as they hurled their own seed through the gathering comet air.

Soon there were so many of them that it was as if all of the Land was alive with their birthing, its rocky heart echoing to their joyous shouts.

And still, in the distant future, the Merging awaited them.

As the comets leapt one by one back into the sky, sucking away the air with them, she held that thought to her exhausted body, cradling it.

Eighty days in and Frank was still making hole at his couple-of-kilometers-a-day target pace. But things had started to get a lot harder.

This was mantle, after all. They were suffering rock bursts. The rock was like stretched wire, under so much pressure it exploded when it was exposed. It was a new regime. New techniques were needed.

Costs escalated. The pressure on Frank to shut down was intense.

Many of the investors had already become extremely rich from the potential of the rich ore lodes discovered in the lower crust and upper mantle. There was talk of opening up new, shallow bores elsewhere on the Moon to seek out further lodes. Frank had proved his point. Why go farther, when the Roughneck was already a commercial success?

But metal ore wasn’t Frank’s goal, and he wasn’t about to stop now.

That was when the first death occurred, all of a hundred kilometers below the surface of the Moon.

She found him in his office at New Dallas, pacing back and forth, an Earth man caged on the Moon, his muscles lifting him off the glass floor.

“Omelettes and eggs,” he said. “Omelettes and eggs.”

“That’s a cliché, Frank.”

“It was probably the fucking Grays.”

“There’s no evidence of sabotage.”

He paced. “Look, we’re in the mantle of the Moon—”

“You don’t have to justify it to me,” she said, but he wasn’t listening.

“The mantle,” he said. “You know, I hate it. A thousand kilometers of worthless shit.”

“It was the changeover to the subterrene that caused the disaster. Right?”

He ran a hand over his greasy hair. “If you were a prosecutor, and this was a court, I’d challenge you on ‘caused.’ The accident happened when we switched over to the subterrene, yes.”

They had already gone too deep for the simple alloy casing or the cooled lunar glass Frank had used in the upper levels. To get through the mantle they would use a subterrene, a development of obsolete deep-mining technology. It was a probe that melted its way through the rock and built its own casing behind it: a tube of hard, high-melting-point quasiglass.

Frank started talking, rapidly, about quasiglass. “It’s the stuff the Lunar Japanese use for rocket nozzles. Very high melting point. It’s based on diamond, but it’s a quasicrystal, so the lab boys tell me, halfway between a crystal and a glass. Harder than ordinary crystal because there are no neat planes for cracks and defects to propagate. And it’s a good heat insulator similarly. Besides that, we support the hole against collapse and shear stress with rock bolts, fired through the casing and into the rock beyond. We do everything we can to ensure the integrity of our structure…”

This was, she realized, a first draft of the testimony he would have to give to the investigating commissions.

When the first subterrene started up, it built a casing with a flaw, undetected for a hundred meters. There had been an implosion. They lost the subterrene itself, a kilometer of bore, and a single life, of a senior tool pusher.

“We’ve already restarted,” Frank said. “A couple of days and we’ll have recovered.”

“Frank, this isn’t a question of schedule loss,” she said. “It’s the wider impact. Public perception. Come on; you know how important this is. If we don’t handle this right we’ll be shut down.”

He seemed reluctant to absorb that. He was silent for maybe half a minute.

Then his mood switched. He started pacing. “You know, we can leverage this to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to turn this guy we lost — what was his name? — into a hero.” He snapped his fingers. “Did he have any family? A ten-year-old daughter would be perfect, but we’ll work with whatever we have. Get his kids to drop cherry blossom down the hole. You know the deal. The message has to be right. The kids want the bore to be finished, as a memorial to the brave hero. ”

“Frank, the dead engineer was a she.”

“And we ought to think about the Gray angle. Get one of them to call our hero tool pusher a criminal.”

“Frank—”

He faced her. “You think this is immoral. Bullshit. It would be immoral to stop; otherwise, believe me, everyone on this Moon is going to die in the long run. Why do you think I asked you to set up the kids’ clubs?”

“For this?”

“Hell, yes. Already I’ve had some of those chicken-livered investors try to bail out. Now we use the kids, to put so much fucking pressure on it’s impossible to turn back. If that tool pusher had a kid in one of our clubs, in fact, that’s perfect.” He hesitated, then pointed a stubby finger at her face. “This is the bottleneck. Every project goes through it. I need to know you’re with me, Xenia.”

She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then sighed. “You know I am.”

He softened, and dropped his hands. “Yeah. I know.” But there was something in his voice, she thought, that didn’t match his words. An uncertainty that hadn’t been there before. “Omelettes and eggs,” he muttered. “Whatever.” He clapped his hands. “So. What’s next?”

This time, Xenia didn’t fly directly to Edo. Instead she programmed the hopper to make a series of slow orbits of the abandoned base.

It took her an hour to find the glimmer of glass, reflected sunlight sparkling from a broad expanse of it, at the center of an ancient, eroded crater. She landed a kilometer away, to avoid disturbing the flower structures. She suited up quickly, clambered out of the hopper, and set off on foot.

She made ground quickly, over this battered, ancient landscape, restrained only by the Moon’s gentle gravity. Soon the land ahead grew bright, glimmering like a pool. She slowed, approaching cautiously.

The flower was larger than she had expected. It must have covered a quarter, even a third of a hectare, delicate glass leaves resting easily against the regolith from which they had been constructed, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions.

Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for seed-carrying aluminum-burning rockets, perhaps.

“I must startle you again.”

She turned. It was Takomi, of course, in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.

“Life on the Moon,” she said.

“Its life cycle is simple, you know. It grows during periods of transient comet atmospheres — like the present — and lies dormant between such events. The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks down the soil for the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.

“Then, during the night, the leaves act as cold traps. They absorb the comet frost that falls on them, water and methane and carbon dioxide, incorporating that, too, into the flowers’ substance.”

“And the roots?”

“The roots are kilometers long. They tap deep wells of nutrient, water and organic substances. Deep inside the Moon.”

So Frank, of course, was right about the existence of the volatiles, as she had known he would be.

“I suppose you despise Frank Paulis.”

“Why should I?” he said mildly.

“Because he is trying to dig out the sustenance for these plants. Rip it out of the heart of the Moon. Are you a Gray, Takomi?”

He shrugged. “We have different ways. Your ancestors have a word: mechta. ”

“Dream.” It was the first Russian word she had heard spoken in many months.

“It was the name your engineers wished to give to the first probe they sent to the Moon: Mechta. But it was not allowed, by those who decide such things. Well, I am living a dream, here on the Moon: a dream of rock and stillness, here with my Moon flower. That is how you should think of me.”

He smiled and walked away.

The Land was rich with life now: her children, her descendants, drinking in air and Light. Their songs echoed through the core of the Land, strong and powerful.

But it would not last, for it was time for the Merging.

First there was a sudden explosion of Rains, too many of them to count, the comets leaping out of the ground, one after the other.

Then the Land itself became active. Great sheets of rock heated, becoming liquid, and withdrawing into the interior of the Land.

Many died, of course. But those that remained bred frantically. It was a glorious time, a time of death and life.

Changes accelerated. She clung to the thin crust that contained the world. She could feel huge masses rising and falling far beneath her. The Land grew hot, dissolving into a deep ocean of liquid rock.

And then the Land itself began to break up, great masses of it hurling themselves into the sky.

More died.

But she was not afraid. It was glorious! As if the Land itself was birthing comets, as if the Land was like herself, hurling its children far away.

The end came swiftly, more swiftly than she had expected, in an explosion of heat and light that burst from the heart of the Land itself. The last, thin crust was broken open, and suddenly there was no more Land, nowhere for her roots to grip.

It was the Merging, the end of all things, and it was glorious.

Chapter 20 The Tunnel in the Moon

Frank and Xenia, wrapped in their spiderweb space suits, stood on a narrow aluminum bridge. They were under the South Pole derrick, suspended over the tunnel Frank had dug into the heart of the Moon.

The area around the derrick had long lost its pristine theme-park look. There were piles of spill, and waste, and ore that had been dug out of the deepening hole in the ground. LHDs, automated load-haul-dump vehicles, crawled continually around the site. The LHDs, baroque aluminum beetles, sported giant fins to radiate off their excess heat — no conduction or convection here — and most of their working parts were two meters or more off the ground, where sprays of the abrasive lunar dust wouldn’t reach. The LHDs, Xenia realized, were machines made for the Moon.

The shaft below Xenia was a cylinder of sparkling lunar glass. The tunnel receded to the center of the Moon, to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few meters, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Refrigeration and other conduits snaked along the tunnel. It was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.

Momentarily dizzy, she stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Moon.

Frank rubbed his hands. “It’s wonderful. Like the old days. Engineers overcoming obstacles, building things.” He seemed oddly nervous; he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“And,” she said, “thanks to all this problem solving, we got through the mantle.”

“Hell, yes, we got through it. You’ve been away from the project too long, babe.” He took her hands. Squat in his suit, his face invisible, he was still, unmistakably, Frank J. Paulis. “And now, it’s our time.” Without hesitation — he never hesitated — he stepped to the lip of the delicate metal bridge.

She walked with him, a single step. A stitched safety harness, suspended from pulleys above, impeded her.

“Will you follow me?” he asked.

She took a breath. “I’ve always followed you.”

“Then come.”

Hand in hand, they jumped off the bridge.

Slow as a snowflake, tugged by gravity, Xenia fell toward the heart of the Moon. The loose harness dragged gently at her shoulders and crotch, slowing her fall. She was guided by a couple of spiderweb cables, tautly threaded down the axis of the shaft; through her suit’s fabric she could hear the hiss of the pulleys.

There was nothing beneath her feet save a diminishing tunnel of light. Xenia could hear her heart pound. Frank was laughing.

The depth markers on the wall were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But she was suspended here, in the vacuum, as if she were in orbit; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.

Their speed picked up quickly. In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine regolith layers, the Moon’s pulverized outer skin, and they were sailing down through the megaregolith. Giant chunks of deeply shattered rock crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.

The material beyond the walls turned smooth and gray now. This was lunar bedrock, anorthosite, buried beyond even the probings and pulverizing of the great impactors. Unlike Earth, there would be no fossils here, she knew, no remnants of life in these deep levels; only a smooth gradation of minerals, processed by the slow workings of geology. In some places there were side shafts dug away from the main exploratory bore. They led to stopes, lodes of magnesium-rich rocks extruded from the Moon’s frozen interior, which were now being mined out by Frank’s industry partners. She saw the workings as complex blurs, hurrying upward as she fell, gone like dream visions.

Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.

They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock on the other side of the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull gray-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.

“The mantle of the Moon,” Frank whispered, gripping her hands. “Basalt. Up here it ain’t so bad. But further down the rock is so soft it pulls like taffy when you try to drill it. A thousand kilometers of mush, a pain in the ass.”

They passed a place where the glass walls were marked with an engraving; stylized flowers with huge lunar petals. This was where a technician had been killed in an implosion. The little memorial shot upward and was lost in the light. Frank didn’t comment.

The rock was now glowing a bright cherry-pink, rushing upward past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Xenia sensed the heat, despite her suit’s insulation and the refrigeration of the tunnel.

Falling, falling.

Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. The conduits carried water, bearing the Moon’s deep heat to hydrothermal plants on the surface. She was becoming dazzled by the pink-white glare of the rocks.

The harness tugged at her sharply, slowing her. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque ceramic that plugged the tunnel.

“End of the line,” Frank said. “Down below there’s only the downhole tools and the casing machine and other junk… Do you know where you are? Xenia, we’re more than a thousand kilometers deep, two-thirds of the way to the center of the Moon.”

The pulleys gripped harder and they slowed, drifting to a halt a meter above the platform. With Frank’s help she loosened her harness and spilled easily to the platform itself, landing on her feet, as if after a sky dive.

She glanced at her chronometer patch. The fall had taken twenty minutes.

She got her balance and looked around. They were alone here.

The platform was crowded with science equipment: anonymous gray boxes linked by cables to softscreens and batteries. Sensors and probes, wrapped in water-cooling jackets, were plugged into ports in the walls. She could see data collected from the lunar material flickering over the softscreens, measurements of porosity and permeability, data from gas meters and pressure gauges and dynamometers and gravimeters. There was evidence of work here: small inflatable shelters; spare backpacks; notepads; even, incongruously, a coffee cup. Human traces, here at the heart of the Moon.

She walked to the walls. Her steps were light; she was almost floating. There was rock, pure and unmarked, all around her, beyond the windowlike walls, glowing pink.

“The deep interior of the Moon,” Frank said, joining her. He ran his gloved hands over the glass. “What the rock hounds call primitive material, left over from the Solar System’s formation. Never melted and differentiated like the mantle, never bombarded like the surface. Untouched since the Moon budded off of Earth itself.”

“I feel light as a feather,” she said. And so she did; she felt as if she were going to float back up the borehole like a soap bubble.

Frank glared up into the tunnel above them, and concentric light rings glimmered in his faceplate. “All that rock up there doesn’t pull at us. It might as well be cloud, rocky cloud, hundreds of kilometers of it.”

“I suppose, at the center itself, you would be weightless.”

“I guess.”

On one low bench stood a glass beaker, covered by clear plastic film. She picked it up; she could barely feel it, dwarfed within her thick, inflexible gloves. It held a liquid that sloshed in the gentle gravity. The liquid was murky brown, not quite transparent.

Frank was grinning. Immediately she understood.

“I wish you could drink it,” he said. “I wish we could drink a toast. You know what that is? It’s water. Moon water, water from the lunar rocks.” He took the beaker and turned around in a slow, ponderous dance. “It’s all around us, just as Mariko predicted: a fucking ocean of it. Wadsleyite and majorite with three percent water by weight… Incredible. We did it, babe.”

“Frank. You were right. I had no idea.”

“I sat on the results. I wanted you to be the first to see this. To see my…” He couldn’t find the word.

“Affirmation,” she said gently. “This is your affirmation.”

“Yeah. I’m a hero.”

It was true, she knew.

It was going to work out just as Frank had projected. As soon as the implications of the find became apparent — that there really were oceans down here, buried inside the Moon — the imaginations of the Lunar Japanese would be fast to follow Frank’s vision. This, after all, wasn’t a simple matter of plugging holes in the environment-support system loops. There was surely enough resource here, just as Frank said, to future-proof the Moon. And perhaps this would be a pivot of human history, a moment when humanity’s long decline was halted and mankind found a place to live in a system that was no longer theirs.

Not for the first time Xenia recognized Frank’s brutal wisdom in his dealings with people: to bulldoze them as far as he had to until they couldn’t help but agree with him.

Frank would become the most famous man on the Moon.

That wasn’t going to help him, though, she thought sadly.

“So,” she said. “You proved your point. Will you stop now?”

“Stop the borehole?” He sounded shocked. “Hell, no. We go on, all the way to the core.”

“Frank, the investors are already pulling out.”

“Chicken-livered assholes. I’ll go on if I have to pay for it myself.” He put the beaker down. “Xenia, the water isn’t enough; it’s just a first step. We have to go on. We still have to find the other volatiles. Methane. Organics. We go on. Damn it, Roughneck is my project.”

“No, it isn’t. We sold so much stock to get through the mantle that you don’t have a majority anymore.”

“But we’re rich again.” He laughed. “We’ll buy it all back.”

“Nobody’s selling. They certainly won’t after you publish this finding. You’re too successful. I’m sorry, Frank.”

“So the bad guys are closing in, huh? Well, the hell with it. I’ll find a way to beat them. I always do.” He grabbed her gloved hands. “Never mind that now. Listen, I’ll tell you why I brought you down here. I’m winning. I’m going to get everything I ever wanted. Except one thing.”

She was bewildered. “What?”

“I want us to get married. I want us to have kids. We came here together, from out of the past, and we should have a life of our own, on this Japanese Moon, in this future.” His voice was heavy, laden with emotion, almost cracking. In the glare of rock light, she couldn’t see his face.

She hadn’t expected this. She couldn’t think of a response.

Now his voice was almost shrill. “You’ve gone quiet.”

“The comet,” she said softly.

He was silent for a moment, still gripping her hands.

“The methane rocket,” she said. “On the comet. It was detected.”

She could tell he was thinking of denying all knowledge. Then he said, “Who found it?”

“Takomi.”

“The piss-drinking old bastard out at Edo?”

“Yes.”

“That still doesn’t prove—”

“I checked the accounts. I found where you diverted the funds, how you built the rocket, how you launched it, how you rendezvoused it with the comet. Everything.” She sighed. “You never were smart at that kind of stuff, Frank. You should have asked me.”

“Would you have helped?”

“No.”

He released her hands. “I never meant it to hit there, on Fracastorius.”

“I know that. Nevertheless, that’s what happened.”

He picked up the glass of lunar water. “But you know what, I’d have gone ahead even if I had known. I needed that fucking comet to kick start this. It was the only way. You can’t stagnate. That way lies extinction. If I gave the Lunar Japanese a choice, they’d be sucking water out of old concrete for the rest of time.”

“But it would be their choice.”

“And that’s more important than not dying?”

She shrugged. “It’s inevitable they’ll know soon.”

He turned to her, and she sensed he was grinning again, irrepressible. “At least I finished my project. At least I got to be a hero… Marry me,” he said again.

“No.”

“Why not? Because I’m going to be a con?”

“Not that.”

“Then why?”

“Because I wouldn’t last, in your heart. You move on, Frank.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. But there was no conviction in his voice. “So,” he said. “No wedding bells. No little Lunar Americans, to teach these Japanese how to play football.”

“I guess not.”

He walked away. “Makes you think, though,” he said, his back to her.

“What?”

He waved a hand at the glowing walls. “This technology isn’t so advanced. Neil and Buzz couldn’t have done it, but maybe we could have opened up some kind of deep mine on the Moon by the end of the twentieth century, say. Started to dig out the water, live off the land. If only we’d known it was here, all this wealth, even NASA might have done it. And then you’d have an American Moon, and who knows how history might have turned out?”

“None of us can change things,” she said.

He looked at her, his face masked by rock light. “However much we might want to.”

“No.”

“How long do you think I have, before they shut me down?”

“I don’t know. Weeks. No more.”

“Then I’ll have to make those weeks count.”

He showed her how to hook her suit harness to a fresh pulley set, and they began the long, slow ride to the surface ofthe Moon.

Abandoned on its bench top at the bottom of the shaft, she could see the covered beaker, the Moon water within.

After her descent into the Moon, she returned to Edo, seeking stillness.

The world of the Moon, here on Farside, was simple: the regolith below, the sunlight that flowed from the black sky above. Land, light, dark. That, and herself, alone. When she looked downsun, at her own shadow, the light bounced from the dust back toward her, making a halo around her head.

The Moon flower had, she saw, significantly diminished since her last visit; many of the outlying petals were broken off or shattered.

After a time, Takomi joined her.

“Evidence of the flowers has been found before,” he said.

“It has?”

“I have, discreetly, studied old records of the lunar surface. Another legacy of richer days past, when much of the Moon was studied in some detail. But those explorers, long dead now, did not know what they had found, of course. The remains were buried under regolith layers. Some of them were billions of years old.” He sighed. “The evidence is fragmentary. Nevertheless I have been able to establish a pattern.”

“What kind of pattern?”

“It is true that the final seeding event drew the pods, with unerring accuracy, back to this site, as you observed. The pods were absorbed into the structure of the primary plant, here, which has since withered. The seeding was evidently triggered by the arrival of the comet, the enveloping of the Moon by its new, temporary atmosphere. But I have studied the patterns of earlier seedings—”

“Triggered by earlier comet impacts.”

“Yes. All of them long before human occupancy began here — just one or two impacts per billion years. Brief comet rains, spurts of air, before the long winter closed again. And each impact triggered a seeding event.”

“Ah. I understand. These are like desert flowers, which bloom in the brief rain. Poppies, rockroses, grasses, chenopods.”

“Exactly. They complete their life cycles quickly, propagate as vigorously as possible, while the comet air lasts. And then their seeds lie dormant, for as long as necessary, waiting for the next chance event, perhaps as long as a billion years.”

“I imagine they spread out, trying to cover the Moon. Propagate as fast and as far as possible.”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Then what?”

“At every comet event, the seedings converge. Just as they did here. These plants work backward, Xenia.

“A billion years ago there were a thousand sites like this. In a great seeding, these diminished to a mere hundred; those fortunate few were bombarded with seeds, while the originators withered. And later, another seeding reduced that hundred to twelve or so. And finally, the twelve are reduced to one. This one.”

She tried to think that through; she pictured the little seed pods converging, diminishing in number. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Not for us, who are ambassadors from Earth,” he said. “Earth life spreads, colonizes, whenever and wherever it can. But this is lunar life, Xenia. And the Moon is an old, cooling, dying world. Its richest days were brief moments, far in the past. And so life has adjusted to the situation. Do you understand?”

“…I think so. But now, this is truly the last of them? The end?”

“Yes. The flower is already dying.”

“But why here? Why now?”

He shrugged. “Xenia, your colleague Frank Paulis is determined to rebuild the Moon, inside and out. Even if he fails, others will follow where he showed the way. The stillness of the Moon is lost.” He sniffed. “My own garden might survive, but in a park, like your old Apollo landers, to be gawked at by tourists. It is a… diminishing. And so with the flowers. There is nowhere for them to survive, on the new Moon, in our future.”

“But how do they know they can’t survive? Oh, that’s the wrong question. Of course the flowers don’t know anything.”

He paused, regarding her. “Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“We are smart, and aggressive. We think smartness is derived from aggression. Perhaps that is true. But perhaps it takes a greater imagination to comprehend stillness than to react to the noise and clamor of our shallow human world.”

She frowned, remembering Mariko’s evidence about neural structures in the flowers. “You’re saying these things are conscious?”

“I believe so. It would be hard to prove. I have spent much time in contemplation here, however. And I have developed an intuition. A sympathy, perhaps.”

“But that seems cruel. What kind of God would plan such a thing? Think about it. You have a conscious creature, trapped on the surface of the Moon, in this desolate, barren environment. And its way of living, stretching back billions of years maybe, has had the sole purpose of diminishing itself, to prepare for this final extinction, this death, this smyert. What is the purpose of consciousness, confronted by such desolation?”

“But perhaps it is not so,” he said gently. “The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. The future of the Moon, in the direction we face, may be desolate. But not the past. So why not face that way?”

She barely followed him. But she remembered the kare sansui, the waterless stream traced in the regolith. It was impossible to tell if the stream was flowing from past to future, or future to past; if the hills of heaped regolith were rising or sinking.

“Perhaps to the flowers,” he said, “to this flower — the last, or perhaps the first — this may be a beginning, not an end.”

“Vileekee bokh. You are telling me that these plants are living backward in time? Propagating not into the future, but into the past?”

“In the present there is but one of them. In the past there are many — billions, perhaps. In our future lies death for them; in our past lies glory. So why not look that way?” He touched her gloved hand. “The important thing is that you must not grieve for the flowers. They have their dream, their mechta, of a better Moon, in the deep past, or deep future. The universe is not always cruel, Xenia Makarova. And you must not hate Frank, for what he has done.”

“I don’t hate him.”

“There is a point of view from which he is not taking nutrients from the heart of the Moon, but giving. He is pumping the core of the Moon full of water and volatiles, and when he is done he will even fill in the hole… You see?”

“Takomi.”

He was still.

“That isn’t your real name, is it? This isn’t your identity.”

He said nothing, face averted from hers.

“I don’t think you are even a man. I think your name is Nemoto. And you are hiding here on the Moon, whiling away the centuries.”

Takomi stood silently for long seconds. “My Moon plants recede into a better past. That, for me, isn’t an option. I must make my way into the unwelcome future. But at least, here, I am rarely disturbed. I hope you will respect that.

“Now come,” Takomi, or Nemoto, said. “I have green tea, and rice cake, and we will sit under the cherry tree, and talk further.”

Xenia nodded, dumbly, and let him — her? — take her by the hand. Together they walked across the yielding antiquity of the Moon.

It was another celebration, here at the South Pole of the Moon. It was the day Project Roughneck promised to fulfill its potential, by bringing the first commercially useful loads of water to the surface.

Once again the crowds were out: investors with their guests, families with children, huge softscreens draped over drilling gear, virtual observers everywhere so everyone on the Moon could share everything that happened here today. Even the Grays were here, to celebrate the project’s end, dancing in elaborate formations.

Earth hovered like a ghost on one horizon, ignored, its sparking wars meaningless.

This time, Xenia didn’t find Frank strutting about the lunar surface in his Stars and Stripes space suit, giving out orders. Frank said he knew which way the wind blew, a blunt Earthbound metaphor no Moon-born Japanese understood. So he had confined himself to a voluntary house arrest, in the new ryokan that had opened up on the summit of one of the tallest rim mountains here.

When she arrived, he waved her in and handed her a drink, a fine sake. The suite was a penthouse, magnificent, decorated in a mix of Western-style and traditional Japanese. One wall, facing the borehole, was just a single huge pane of tough, anhydrous lunar glass. She saw a tumbler of murky water, covered over, on a tabletop. Moon water, his only trophy of Roughneck.

“This is one hell of a cage,” he said. “If you’ve got to be in a cage.” He laughed darkly. “Civilized, these Lunar Japanese. Well, we’ll see.” He eyed her. “What about you? Will you go back to the stars?”

She looked at the oily ripple of the drink in her glass. “I don’t think so. I… like it here. I think I’d enjoy building a world.”

He grunted. “You’ll marry. Have kids. Grandkids.”

“Perhaps.”

He glared at her. “When you do, remember me, who made it possible, and got his ass busted for his trouble. Remember this.”

He walked her to the window.

She gazed out, goddesslike, surveying the activity. The drilling site was an array of blocky machinery, now stained deep gray by dust, all of it bathed in artificial light. The stars hung above the plain, stark and still, and people and their vehicles swarmed over the ancient, broken plain like so many space-suited ants.

“You know, it’s a great day,” she said. “They’re making your dream come true.”

“My dream, hell.” He fetched himself another slug of sake, which he drank like beer. “They stole it from me. And they’re going inward. That’s what Nishizaki and the rest are considering now. I’ve seen their plans. Huge underground cities in the crust, big enough for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, all powered by thermal energy from the rocks. In fifty years you could have multiples of the Moon’s present population, burrowing away busily.” He glanced at his wristwatch, restless.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It wasn’t the fucking point.” He glared up at Earth’s scarred face. “If we dig ourselves into the ground, we won’t be able to see that. We’ll forget. Don’t you get it?”

But now there was activity around the drilling site. She stepped to the window, cupped her hands to exclude the room lights.

People were running, away from the center of the site.

There was a tremor. The building shuddered under her, languidly. A quake, on the still and silent Moon?

Frank was checking his watch. He punched the air and strode to the window. “Right on time. Hot damn.”

“Frank, what have you done?”

There was another tremor, more violent. A small Buddha statue was dislodged from its pedestal and fell gently to the carpeted floor. Xenia tried to keep her feet. It was like riding a rush hour train.

“Simple enough,” Frank said. “Just shaped charges, embedded in the casing. They punched holes straight through the bore wall into the surrounding rock, to let the water and sticky stuff flow right into the pipe and up—”

“A blowout. You arranged a blowout.”

“If I figured this right the interior of the whole fucking Moon is going to come gushing out of that hole. Like puncturing a balloon.” He took her arms. “Listen to me. We will be safe here. I figured it.”

“And the people down there, in the crater? Your managers and technicians? The children?”

“It’s a day they’ll tell their grandchildren about.” He shrugged, grinning, his forehead slick with sweat. “They’re going to lock me up anyhow. At least this way—”

But now there was an eruption from the center of the rig, a tower of liquid, rapidly freezing, that punched its way up through the rig itself, shattering the flimsy buildings covering the head. When the fountain reached high enough to catch the flat sunlight washing over the mountains, it seemed to burst into fire, crystals of ice shining in complex parabolic sheaves, before falling back to the ground.

Frank punched the air. “You know what that is? Kerogen. A tarry stuff you find in oil shales. It contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, potassium, chlorine, other elements… I couldn’t believe it when the lab boys told me what they found down there. Mariko says kerogen is so useful we might as well have found chicken soup in the rocks.” He cackled. “Chicken soup, from the primordial cloud. I won, Xenia. With this blowout I stopped them from building Bedrock City. I’m famous.”

“What about the Moon flowers?”

His face was hard. “Who the fuck cares? I’m a human, Xenia. I’m interested in human destiny, not a bunch of worthless plants we couldn’t even eat.” He waved a hand at the ice fountain. “Look out there, Xenia. I beat the future. I’ve no regrets. I’m a great man. I achieve great things.”

The ground around the demolished drill head began to crack, venting gas and ice crystals; and the deep, ancient richness of the Moon rained down on the people.

Frank Paulis whispered. “And what could be greater than this?”

She was in the Dark, flying, like one of her own seeds. She was surrounded by fragments of the shattered Land, and by her children.

But she could not speak to them, of course; unlike the Land, the Dark was empty of rock, and would not carry her thoughts.

It was a time of stabbing loneliness.

But it did not last long.

Already the cloud was being drawn together, collapsing into a new and greater Land that glowed beneath her, a glowing ocean of rock, a hundred times bigger than the small place she had come from.

And at the last, she saw the greatest comet of all tear itself from the heart of this Land, a ball of fire that lunged into the sky, receding rapidly into the unyielding Dark.

She fell toward that glowing ocean, her heart full of joy at the Merging of the Lands.

In the last moment of her life, she recalled the Giver.

She was the first, and the Giver birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver, who fed the Land.

She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.

She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

Chapter 21 Homecoming

After their journey to the stars, Madeleine and Ben returned to a silent Solar System.

Over a century had elapsed. They themselves had aged less than a year. It was now, astonishingly, the year 2240, an unimaginable, futuristic date. Madeleine had been braced for more historic drift, more cultural isolation.

Not for silence.

As the long weeks of their flight inward from the Saddle Point radius wore away, and the puddle of crowded light that was the inner system grew brighter ahead, they both grew increasingly apprehensive. At length, they were close enough to resolve images of Earth in the Ancestor ’s telescopes. They huddled together by their monitors.

What they saw was an Earth that was brilliant white.

Ice swept down from both poles, encroaching toward the equator. The shapes of the northern continents were barely visible under the huge frozen sheets. The colors of life, brown and green and blue, had been crowded into a narrow strip around the equator. Here and there, easily visible on the night side of the planet, Madeleine made out the spark of fires, of explosions. Gaijin ships orbited Earth, tracking from pole to pole, their ramscoops casting golden light that glimmered from the ice and the oceans, mapping and studying, still following their own immense, patient projects.

Madeleine and Ben were both stunned by this. They studied Earth for hours, barely speaking, skipping meals and sleep periods.

Ben, fearful for his wife, his people on Triton, grew silent, morbid, withdrawing from Madeleine. Madeleine found the loneliness hard to bear. When she slept her dreams were intense, populated by drifting alien artifacts.

The Gaijin flower-ship dropped them into orbit around Earth’s Moon.

Nemoto came to them, at last. She appeared as a third figure in the cramped, scuffed environment of Dreamtime Ancestor ’s Service Module, a digital ghost coalescing from a cloud of cubical pixels.

Her gaze lit on Madeleine. “Meacher. You’re back. You were expected. I have an assignment for you.” She smiled.

“I don’t believe you’re still alive,” Madeleine said. “You must be some kind of virtual simulation.”

“I don’t care what you think. Anyhow, you’ll never know.” Nemoto was small, shrunken, her face a leathery mask, as if with age she was devolving to some earlier proto-human form. She glanced around. “Where’s the FGB module?… Oh. ” Evidently she had just downloaded a summary of their mission from the virtual counterpart who had traveled with them. She glared. “You have to meddle, don’t you, Meacher?”

Madeleine passed a hand through Nemoto’s body; pixels clustered like butterflies. To Madeleine, ten more decades out of her time, the projection was impressive new technology. There was no sign of time delay; Nemoto — or the projector — must be here, on the Moon or in lunar orbit, or else her responses would be delayed by seconds.

“What about Triton?” Ben asked tightly.

Nemoto’s face was empty. “Triton is silent. It’s wise to be silent. But your wife is still alive.”

Madeleine sensed a shift in Ben’s posture, a softening.

“But,” Nemoto said now, “the colony is under threat. A fleet of Gaijin flower-ships and factories is moving out from the asteroids. They’re already in orbit around Jupiter, Saturn, even Uranus. They have projects out there, for instance on Jupiter’s moon Io, which we don’t understand.” Her face worked, her anger visible, even after all this time, her territoriality powerful. “The Earth has collapsed, of course. And though the fools down there don’t know it, the Moon faces long-term resource crises, particularly in metals. And so on. The Gaijin are winning, Meacher. Triton is the only foothold we humans have in the outer system. The last trench. We can’t let the Gaijin take it.”

And you have a plan, Madeleine realized, with a sinking heart. A plan that involves me. So she was immediately plunged back into Nemoto’s manipulation and scheming.

Ben was frowning. He asked Nemoto some pointed questions about her presence, her influence, her resources. What was the political situation now? Who was backing her? What was her funding?

She’d answer none of his questions. She wouldn’t eventell them where, physically, she was, before she disappeared, promising — or threatening — to be back.

Madeleine spent long hours at the windows, watching the Moon.

The Moon was controlled by a tight federal-government structure that seemed to blend seamlessly with a series of corporate alliances, which had grown mainly from the Japanese companies that had funded the first waves of lunar colonization. The lunar authorities had let the Ancestor settle into a wide two-hour orbit, but they wouldn’t let Madeleine and Ben land. It was clear to Madeleine that, to these busy lunar inhabitants, returned star travelers were an irrelevance.

Huge, glowing Gaijin flower-ships looped around the Moon from pole to lunar pole.

This new Moon glowed green and blue, the colors of life and humanity. The Lunar Japanese had peppered the great craters — Copernicus, Eudoxus, Gassendi, Fracastorius, Tsiolkovsky, Verne, many others — with domes, enclosing a freight of water and air and life. Landsberg, the first large colony, remained the capital. The domes were huge now, the crests of some of them reaching two kilometers above the ancient regolith, hexagonal-cell space-frame structures supported by giant, inhabited towers. Covered roads and linear townships connected some of the domes, glowing lines of light over the maria. The Japanese planned to extend their structures until the entire surface of the Moon was glassed over, in a worldhouse. It would be like an immense arboretum, a continuously managed biosphere.

All of this — Madeleine learned, tapping into the web of information which wrapped around the new planet — was fueled by huge core-tapping bores called Paulis mines. Frank Paulis himself was still alive. Madeleine felt a spark of pride that one of her own antique generation had achieved such greatness. But, fifty years after his huge technical triumph, Paulis was disgraced, incommunicado.

Virtual Nemoto materialized once more.

Madeleine had found out that Nemoto was still alive, as best anybody knew. But she had dropped out of sight for a long period. It was rumored she had lived as a recluse on Farside, still relatively uninhabited. It had been a breakdown, it seemed, that had lasted for decades. Nemoto would say nothing of any of this, nothing of herself, even of the history Madeleine and Ben had skipped over. Rather, she wanted to talk only of the future, her projects, just as she always had.

“Good news.” She smiled, her face skull-like. “I have a ship.”

“What ship?” Ben asked.

“Gurrutu. One of my colony ships. It’s completed the Earth-Neptune round trip twice already. It’s in high Earth orbit.” She looked wistful. “It’s actually safer there than orbiting the Moon. Here, it would be claimed and scavenged for its metals.” She studied them. “You must go to Triton.”

Ben nodded. “Of course.”

Nemoto eyed her. “And you, Meacher.”

Of course Ben must, Madeleine thought. Those are his people, out there in the cold, struggling to survive. It’s his wife, still conveniently alive, having traversed those hundred years the long way. But — regardless of Nemoto’s ambitions — it’s nothing to do with me.

But, as she gazed at Nemoto’s frail virtual figure, doggedly surviving, doggedly battling, she felt torn. Maybe you aren’t as disengaged from all this as you used to be, Madeleine.

“Even if we make it to Triton,” she said, “what are we supposed to do when we get there? What are you planning, Nemoto?”

“We must stop the Gaijin — and whoever follows them,” Nemoto said bleakly. “What else is there to do?”

They would have to spend a month in Earth orbit, working on Gurrutu.

The colony craft was decades old, and showing its age. Gurrutu had been improvised from the liquid-propellant core booster of an Ariane 12 rocket. It was a simple cylinder, with the fuel tanks inside refurbished and made habitable. The main living area of Gurrutu was a big hydrogen tank, with a smaller oxygen tank used for storage. A fireman’s pole ran the length of the hydrogen tank, up through a series of mesh floor partitions to an instrument cluster.

Big, fragile-looking, solar-cell wings had been fixed to the exterior. But reconditioned fission reactors provided power in the dimly lit outer reaches of the Solar System. These were old technology: heavy Soviet-era antiques of a design called Topaz. Each Topaz was a clutter of pipes and tubing and control rods set atop a big radiator cone of corrugated aluminum.

There was a docking mount and an instrument module at one end of the core booster, and a cluster of ion rockets at the other. The ion thrusters were suitable for missions of long duration: missions measured in years, to the outer planets and beyond. And they worked; they had ferried the Yolgnu to Triton. But the ion thrusters needed much refurbishment. And they, too, were old technology. The newest Lunar Japanese helium-3 fusion drives were, Madeleine learned, much more effective.

It wouldn’t be a comfortable ride out to Neptune. The toilets never seemed to vent properly. There was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep. The solar panels had steadily degraded so that there was never enough power, even this close to the Sun. Madeleine soon tired of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.

But forty people had lived in this windowless cavern slum for the five years it had taken Gurrutu to reach Neptune: eating hydroponically grown plants, recycling their waste, trying not to drive each other crazy. The tank had been slung with hammocks and blankets, little nests of humans seeking privacy. Three children had been born here.

Madeleine found scratches on an aluminum bulkhead that recorded a child’s growth, the image of a favorite uncle tucked into the back of a storage cupboard.

The ship could have been built in the twenty-first century — even the twentieth. Human research into spaceflight engineering had all but stopped when the Gaijin had arrived. Madeleine thought of the Gaijin flower-ships that had carried her to the Saddle Point radius and beyond: jewelled, perfect, faultless.

But Gurrutu was simply the best Nemoto could do. And soit was heroic. With such equipment, Nemoto had reachedNeptune — thirty times Earth’s distance from the Sun, ten times farther out than the asteroid belt. Only Malenfant himself, unaided by Gaijin, had gone farther — and his mission had been a one-man stunt. Nemoto had sent two hundred colonists.

As she labored over the lashed-up systems, improvising repairs, Madeleine’s respect for Nemoto deepened.

And, while Madeleine worked, the Earth slid liquidly past the windows of the Gurrutu.

Those old environmentalist Cassandras had been proven right, Madeleine learned. The climate really had been only metastable; in the end, after forty thousand years of digging and building and burning, humans managed to destabilize the world, tip over the whole damn bowl of cherries, until it settled with stunning rapidity into this new, lethal state.

Madeleine could see patterns in the ice — ripples, lines of debris, varying colors — where the ice had flowed from its fastnesses at the poles and the mountain peaks. There was little cloud over the great ice sheets — merely wisps of cirrus, streaked by winds that seemed to tear perpetually around immense low-pressure systems squatting over the frozen poles.

The ice covered most of Canada, and a great tongue of it extended far into the American Midwest, reaching farther south than the Great Lakes — or where the lakes used to be. Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and the other cities were all gone now, drowned. The familiar lobed shapes of the Great Lakes themselves had been overwhelmed by a new, glimmering ocean that stretched a thousand kilometers inland from the eastern seaboard. And to the west, a ribbon of water stretched up from Puget Sound toward Alaska. The land itself was crushed down under the weight of the ice, and seawater had flowed eagerly into the shallow depressions so formed.

Even to the south of the ice line, the land was grievously damaged. Desert stretched from Oregon through Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa — a belt of immense, rippled sand dunes. It was a place of violent winds, for heavy, cold air poured off the ice over the exposed land, and she saw giant dust storms that persisted for days. At night she saw lights glimmer in the vast expanse, flickering: just campfires lit by descendants of midwestern Americans who must be reduced to living like Bedouins in that great cold desert.

South of the ice, Earth at first glance looked as temperate and habitable as it had always done. She could see green in the tropical areas, coral reefs, ships plying to and fro through warm, ice-free seas. But nowhere was unaffected. The great rain forests of equatorial Africa and the Amazon Basin had shrunk back into isolated pockets, surrounded by swathes of what looked like grasslands. Conversely, the Sahara seemed to be turning green. Even the shapes of the continents had changed as glistening sheets of continental shelves were exposed by the falling sea level.

In the southern United States there were still cities: great misty-gray urban sprawls around the coasts and along the river valleys, from Baja California, along the Mexican border, the Gulf of Mexico, to Florida. But New Orleans seemed to be burning continually, great fires blocks wide sending up black smoke plumes that streaked out over hundreds of kilometers. Likewise, there appeared to be a small war raging around Orlando; she made out what looked like tank tracks, frequent explosions that lit up the night.

It was impossible to gather direct news. Presumably all communication was carried out by land lines or with point-to-point modulated lasers; belatedly, it seemed, the inhabitants of Earth had learned the wisdom of not broadcasting their business to the stars. It did appear, though, that some of these wars had been blazing since before the return of the ice.

The most savage conflict appeared to be occurring in northern Africa, where the population of Eurasia — hundreds of millions — had tried to drain into the southern European countries and the new North African grasslands. But any orderly relocation had long broken down. Huge black craters scarred the Sahara, some of them glimmering as if with puddles of glass; and once she made out the telltale shape of a mushroom cloud, rising like a perfect toy from an ochre African horizon.

And — more sinister still — she could see new forms on Earth’s long-suffering hide. They were great sprawling structures, spiderlike, silvery: not like human cities, more centrally organized, the pieces interconnected, like single buildings spanning tens of kilometers. These were Gaijin colonies. There were several of them in the ice-free middle latitudes, with no sign of human occupancy nearby. There were even a handful on the ice sheets themselves, places no human could survive. Nobody knew what the Gaijin were doing in there.

She felt a cold fury. Couldn’t the Gaijin have done something to stop this, to halt the collapse of her world? If not, why the hell were they here?

Ben said he wanted to go to Earth, to Australia, one last time before he left forever. Madeleine quailed at the idea. That’s not my planet anymore. But she didn’t want to oppose Ben’s complex impulse.

An automated ground-to-orbit shuttle came climbing up to meet them. Nemoto had found someone who had agreed to host them, if briefly.

They skimmed through morning light toward Australia, approaching from the south. They received no calls for identification; there was no attempt at traffic control, nothing from the ground. It was like approaching an uninhabited planet.

They drifted over Sydney. The city was still populated, its suburbs scarred by conflict, but there was no harbor; Sydney had been left beached in the country’s drying interior. The rust-red deserts of the center appeared still more desiccated than before. But she saw no signs of humanity. Alice Springs, for example, was burned out, a husk; nothing moved there.

They skimmed low over the great geological features south of the Alice, Ayers Rock and the Olgas. These were uncompromising lumps of hard, ancient sandstone protruding from the flat desert, extensively carved by megayears of water flows. To the Aborigines, nomads on this unforgiving tabletop landscape, these formations must have been as striking as the medieval cathedrals that had loomed over Europe. And so the Aborigines had made them places of totemic and religious significance, spinning Dreamtime stories from cracks and folds until the rocks became a kind of mythic cinema, frozen in geological time. It had been a triumph of the imagination, she supposed, in a land like a sensory deprivation tank.

This had briefly been a center for tourism. The tourists were long gone now, the Western influence vanished in an instant, a dream of fat and affluence. But the Aborigines had remained. From the air she saw slim figures moving slowly over the landscape, round faces turned up to her vehicle, all as it had been for twelve thousand years — just as Ben had once foreseen, she remembered.

Ben peered from his window, silent, withdrawn.

Perhaps a hundred kilometers south of the Alice, they saw a structure of bright blue, a dot in the desert. A tent.

The shuttle dipped, fell like a brick, and skidded to a halt half a kilometer distant from the tent.

Nobody came to meet them. After a few minutes they climbed down to the ground and walked toward the tent.

The land was an immense orange-red table, the sky a sheet of washed-out blue. There was utter silence here: no bird song, no insects. The Sun was high, ferocious, the heat tremendous and dry. They walked cautiously, unused to Earth’s heavy gravity.

Madeleine felt overwhelmed. Save for a few space walks, it was the first time she had been out of a cramped hab module, out in a landscape, for years.

Ben touched her arm. She stopped. Through the heat haze of the horizon, something moved, stately, silent.

“It looks like a lizard,” she whispered. “A komodo dragon, maybe. But—”

“But it’s immense.”

“Another Gaijin experiment, you think?”

“I think we ought to keep still,” he said.

The lizard, a Mesozoic nightmare, paused for long seconds, perhaps a minute, a tongue the length of a whip lashing out at something unseen. Then it moved on, turning away from the humans.

They hurried on.

Their host was a woman: an American, small, compact, stern-faced, her thick black hair tied back severely behind her head. She was dressed in a silvery coverall. She was called Carole Lerner.

Lerner looked them up and down contemptuously. “Nemoto told me to expect you. She didn’t tell me you were two babes in the wood.” She eyed them with hard suspicion. “I have a hoard.”

Ben frowned. “What?”

Lerner said. “I’m not about to tell you where. If I die my caches will self-destruct.”

Madeleine understood quickly. Medicine had collapsed, along with everything else, when the ice had come. So no more antiaging treatments. Such supplies had become the most precious items on the planet. She held up her hands. “We’re no threat to you, Carole.”

Lerner kept watching them.

At last, sternly, she brought them into the tent, which was blessedly cool, the air moist. She dug out a couple of coveralls, indicated they should put them on. “These are priceless. Literally. Therm-aware clothing, all but indestructible. Nobody makes them anymore. People hand them down like heirlooms, mother to child. Be careful with them.”

“We will,” Madeleine promised.

The tent had no partitions. Ben shrugged, stripped naked, and climbed into his coverall. Madeleine followed suit.

Lerner began to boil water for a drink, and she gave them food: a rehydrated soup, its flavor unidentifiable. She looked about sixty. She was in fact much older than that. She turned out to be the Carole Lerner, the woman who had — following another project of Nemoto’s — descended into the clouds of Venus and become the first, and only, human to set foot there.

Ben glanced around, at piles of rock samples, data discs, a few old-fashioned paper books, heavily thumbed, their pages dusty and yellowed.

“My work,” Lerner growled, watching him. “I’m a geologist. No previous generation has lived through the onset of an Ice Age.”

“Are there still journals, science institutes, universities?” Ben asked.

“Not on Earth,” Lerner said, scowling. “I’m caching my samples and notes. Buried deep enough so the animals can’t get ’em. And I post my results and interpretation to the Moon, Mars.” She eyed Madeleine, hostile. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m some old nut, an obsessive. Science doesn’t matter anymore. You star travelers make me sick. You hop and skip through history, and you don’t see a damn thing. I’ll tell you this. The Gaijin work on long time scales. We’re mayflies to them. And that’s why science matters now. More than ever. So we can stay in the game.”

Madeleine raised her hands. “I didn’t…”

But Lerner had turned her attention to her soup, her anger subsiding. Ben touched Madeleine’s arm, and she fell silent.

This is a woman, she thought, who has spent a long time alone.

Lerner had a small car, just a bubble of plastic on a light frame, powered by batteries kept topped up by a big solar-cell array, and with a gigantic tank of water strapped to its roof. The next day she piled them in and drove them west.

After a couple of hours they reached an area that seemed a little less arid. Madeleine saw green vegetation, trees, tufts of grass, birds wheeling. They came to a shallow creek, dry, that Lerner turned to follow. They passed what appeared to be an abandoned farm, burned out.

They climbed a shallow rise, and Lerner slowed the car, let it run forward almost noiselessly. Finally, as they neared the crest, she cut the engine and let the car’s momentum carry it forward in silence.

As they went over the rise, the land opened up before Madeleine.

There was water, a great calm blue pool of it, stretching halfway to the horizon, utterly unexpected in this dry old place. She could actually smell the water. Her soul felt immediately lifted, some primitive instinct responding.

And it took a full minute of looking, of letting her eyes become accustomed to the landscape, before she could see the animals.

There was a herd of what looked like rhinoceros, lumbering cylinders of flesh, jostling clumsily at the water’s edge. But they had no horns. One of them raised a massive head in which small black eyes were embedded like studs. It was quite spectacularly ugly. She saw that it had small, oddly human feet; it trod delicately.

“Diprotodons,” Lerner murmured. “Very common now.”

Madeleine made out kangaroolike creatures of all sizes — bizarre, overblown animals, some so huge it seemed they could barely lift themselves off the ground; but jump they did, in clumsy lollops. There were creatures like ground sloth that Lerner said were a variety of giant wombat.

And there were predators. Madeleine saw packs of wolf-sized animals warily circling the grazing, drinking herbivores. Some resembled dogs, some cats.

“It’s the same elsewhere,” Lerner said. “As the ice spreads, the grasslands and forests of the temperate climes are retreating, to be replaced by tundra, steppe, spruce forests.”

“Places these reconstructed creatures can survive,” Ben said.

“Yes. But the Gaijin aren’t responsible for everything. In Asia there are reindeer, musk oxen, horses, bison. In North America, the wolves and bears and even the mountain lions are making a recovery.” She smiled again. “But in the valley of the Thames, I’ve heard, there are woolly mammoths… Now that I’d like to see.”

They sat for long hours watching antique herbivores feed.

They drove on. They drove for hours.

It was only after they had returned to Lerner’s camp, with the shuttle parked patiently by, that Madeleine realized she hadn’t seen a single human being, not one, nor any sign of recent human habitation, all day.

They stayed three days. Gradually Lerner seemed to learn to tolerate them.

At the end of the last day, Lerner made them a final meal. As the Sun sank to the horizon, they sat sipping recycled water in the shade of Lerner’s tent.

They swapped sea stories. Lerner told them about Venus. In return, they told her of the Chaera, huddling in the dismal glow of a black hole. And they talked of the changes that had come over humanity.

“There were a lot of words,” Lerner said sourly. “Refugee, relocate, discontinuity, famine, disease, war. There was death on a scale we haven’t seen since the twentieth century. And people keep right on being born. You know what the average age of humans is now?”

“What?”

“Fifteen years old. Just fifteen. To most people on the planet this is normal.” She waved a hand, indicating the depopulated town, the ice-transformed climate, the strange reconstructed animals, the wispy flower-ships that crossed the sky above. “We’re in the middle of a fucking epochal catastrophe here, and people have forgotten.” She spat in the dirt and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Ben leaned forward. “Carole. Do you think Nemoto is right? That the Gaijin are trying to destroy us?”

Lerner squinted. “I don’t think so. But they don’t want to save us either. They are… studying us.”

“What are they trying to find out?”

“Beats me. But then, they probably wouldn’t understand what I’m trying to find out.”

After a time, Lerner went out to fetch more drink.

In Ben’s arms, Madeleine murmured, “We humans don’t seem to age very well, do we?”

“No.”

But then, she thought, humans aren’t meant to live so long. Maybe the Gaijin are used to this perspective. We aren’t. And the feeling of helplessness is crushing. No wonder Lerner is an obsessive, Nemoto a recluse.

Ben was silent.

“You’re thinking about Lena,” she said. “Are you frightened?”

“Why should I be frightened?”

“A hundred years is a long time,” Madeleine said gently.

“But we are yirritja and dhuwa,” he said. “We are matched.”

She hesitated. “And us?”

He just smiled, absently.

Too hot, she peered up at the sky. There was a lot of dust suspended in the air, obscuring many of the stars, and the Moon was almost full, gray splashed with virulent green. Nevertheless, she could see flower-ships swooping easily across the sky. Alien ships, orbiting Earth, unremarked.

And beyond the ships, she saw flickers among the stars. In the direction of the great constellation of Orion, for instance. Sparks, bursts. As if the stars were flaring, exploding. She’d noticed this before, found no explanation. It was strange, chilling. The sky wasn’t supposed to change.

Clearly, something was headed this way. Something that spanned the stars, a wave front of colonizing aliens, perhaps.

“I don’t like it here,” she said.

“You mean Australia?”

“No. The planet. The sky. It isn’t ours anymore.”

“If it ever was.”

I’m frightened of the sky, Madeleine thought. But I can’t run away again. I’m involved — just as Nemoto intended.

I have to go to Triton.

To do what? Blindly follow Nemoto’s latest insane scheme?

She smiled inwardly. Maybe I’ll think of something when we get there.

Lerner brought back a bottle of some kind of hooch; it tasted like fortified wine.

She smiled at them coldly. “I heard that in Spain and France people have gone back to the caves, where the art still survives from the last Ice Age. And they are adding new layers of painting, of the animals they see around them. Maybe it was all a dream, do you think? The warm period, the interglacial, our civilization. Maybe all that matters is the ice, and the cave.”

As the light failed, and the inhabited Moon brightened, they drank a series of toasts: to Venus, to the Chaera, to Earth, to the ice.

Chapter 22 Triton Dreamtime

Even before Neptune showed a disc, Madeleine could see that it was blue, and Triton white. Blue planet, white moon, swimming mistily out of the huge slow-moving dark like exotic deep-sea fish.

Neptune swelled into a disc, made almost full by the pinpoint Sun behind her. The looming planet was dim, at first just a faintly blue hole against the stars, then gradually, as her eyes dark-adapted, filling with misty detail, becoming a ball of subtle blue and violet, visibly structured. Bands of darker blue girdled the planet, following lines of latitude. There were big storm systems, swirling knots like Jupiter’s red spot. And there were thin stripes of white, higher clouds far above the blue, clouds that formed and dissipated within a few hours, surprisingly rapidly. Sometimes, when the angle of the Sun was right, she could see those high clouds casting shadows on the deeper layers beneath.

She was a long way from home.

It was impossible even to grasp the immensities of scale here. The Sun showed as no more than an intense star, bright enough to cast shadows, gray but razor sharp. The Sun’s gravity grip was so loosened that Neptune took more than a hundred times as long as Earth to complete a single orbit. And Neptune was surrounded by emptiness more than ten times wider than Earth’s orbit around the Sun — an emptiness, indeed, that could have contained the whole of Jupiter’s orbit.

Out here, in the stillness and cold and dark, the worlds that had spawned were not like Earth. Here the planets had grown immense, misty, stuffed with light elements like hydrogen and helium that had boiled away from the hot, busy inner worlds. So Neptune’s rocky core was buried beneath thick layers of opaque gas; the blue was of methane, not water; there were no continents or ice caps here.

But she had not expected that Neptune would be so stunningly Earthlike. She felt tugs of nostalgic longing; for Earth itself, of course, was no longer blue, but a diseased white: the white of encroaching ice.

On the last day of its long flight, Gurrutu, engines blazing, swept around the limb of Neptune. The maneuver occurred in complete silence, and as Madeleine watched the huge world swim past her, it was as if she were flying through some cold, dark, gigantic cathedral.

And there was Triton, already bright and growing brighter, a pink-white pearl floating in emptiness.

The final approach to Triton was a challenge for the navigation routines. Triton, uniquely among the Solar System’s larger moons, orbited Neptune in a retrograde manner, opposite to the spin of Neptune itself. And Triton’s orbit was severely pitched up, some twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. It was thought these eccentricities of Triton were a relic of its peculiar origin: It had once been an independent body, like Pluto, but had been captured by Neptune, perhaps by impact with another moon or by grazing Neptune’s atmosphere, a catastrophic event that had resulted in global melting before the moon had learned to endure its entrapment.

Gurrutu entered a looping elliptical orbit. Madeleine watched as a surface of crumpled, pink-streaked water ice rolled beneath the craft. Triton’s misty twilight was marked by a single, yellow, man-made beacon: at the site of Kasyapa Township, home to Ben Roach’s people. They were not alone in Triton orbit. Many emigrant transport ships, of the same design as Gurrutu, still circled here. Others had been driven into the surface, to be broken up for raw materials.

After a day, a small shuttle came up to meet them. Triton’s atmosphere, a wisp of nitrogen laced with hydrocarbons, was too thin to support any kind of aircraft; so the shuttle would descend from orbit standing on its rockets, as Apollo astronauts had once landed on the Moon.

As the lander swiveled, the icy ground opened out before her. It was white, laced with pink and, here and there, darker streaks, like wind-blown dust. It was crowded with detail, she saw, with ridges and clefts and pits in the ice, as if the skin of the planet had shriveled in some impossible heat.

The lander tipped up and fell sharply, entering the last phase of its descent routine. The horizon flattened out quickly, and detail exploded at her. She was descending into a region crisscrossed by shallow ridges, a parquetry of planes and pits in the ice. But there was evidence of human activity: two long straight furrows cut across the random geologic features, a pair of roadways as straight as any Roman road, neatly melted into the ice. And at their terminus, set at the center of one of the walled ice pits, she saw a small octagonal pad of what looked like concrete, a cluster of silvery tanks and other buildings nearby.

The final landing was gentle. Madeleine and Ben suited up and climbed out of the lander.

The plain around them was still, the fuel tanks and crude surface buildings pale and silent. Under her boots there was a crunch of frost overlaying a harder, whiter rock.

Not rock, she told herself. This was ice, water ice. She scraped at the ice with her boot. It was impenetrable, unyielding, and she failed to mark its surface; it was like a hard, compacted stone. Here, in the intense cold, ice played the part of silicate rocks on Earth. There was an elusive pink stain about the ice, almost too faint to see. Some kind of sunlight-processed organics, perhaps.

She took a step forward, two. She floated and hopped, moonwalk-style. In fact, she knew, Triton’s gravity was little more than half the strength of the Moon’s. But she was a big clumsy human with a poor gravity sense; to her body, Triton and Moon were both lumped together in a catch-all category called “weak gravity.”

She looked up, into a black sky. There was no sense of air above her, no scattering of the sunlight: only a deep, starry sky, as if seen from the high desert — but with a dominant bright pinprick at the center of it. The Sun was bright enough to cast shadows, but it was not like authentic sunlight, she thought, more like illumination by a very bright planet, like Venus. The land was a plain of pale white, delicate, a land of midnight stillness, its planes and folds seeming gauzy in the thin light. It seemed a creation of smoke or mist, not of rock-solid ice.

Now she tipped back and peered overhead, where Neptune hung in the sky. The planet appeared as large as fifteen of Earth’s full Moons, strung across the sky together. It was half-full, gaunt, almost spectral.

From the corner of her eye she saw movement: flakes of pure white, sparsely descending around her.

“Snow, on Triton?”

“I think it’s nitrogen,” Ben said.

Madeleine tried to catch a flake of nitrogen snow on her glove. She wondered how the crystals would differ from the water-ice snow of Earth. But the flakes were too elusive, too sparse, and they were soon gone.

Ben tapped her shoulder and pointed to another corner of the sky, closer to the horizon. There was what looked like a star, perhaps surrounded by a diffuse disc of light.

It was a Gaijin engineering convoy: alien ships, built of asteroid rock and ice, en route to Triton.

The refugee Yolgnu had established their home in the rim wall of a shallow, circular depression called Kasyapa Cavus. This was on the eastern edge of Bubembe Regio, a region of so-called cantaloupe terrain, the complex, parquetlike landscape of the type Madeleine had noticed during the landing. The Cavus had a smooth, bowl-like floor, easy to traverse. There were tractors here, whose big, gauzy, balloon tires seemed to have made no impression on the icy ground. Kasyapa Township was a system of branching caverns. The colonists had burrowed far into the ice-rock, ensuring that a thick layer of ice and spacecraft-hull metal shielded them from the radiation flux of Neptune’s magnetosphere and from the relic cosmic radiation of deep space.

She was given a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings — book chips, a few clothes, virtuals of an X-ray burster and a black-hole accretion ring — into the cabin. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place. The wall surface — Triton ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic — was smooth and hard under Madeleine’s hand. After the cool spaces of the Neptune system, she found Kasyapa immediately claustrophobic.

Ben Roach was swallowed up by the family he had left behind, two whole new generations of nephews and nieces and grand-nephews and grand-nieces.

And here, of course, was Lena Roach. She had become a small, precise woman whose silences suggested great depths. She hadn’t seen her husband, Ben, for a hundred of her years, for most of her long life. But she had waited for him, built a home in the most unforgiving of environments.

It was immediately clear she still loved Ben, and he lovedher, despite the gulfs of time that separated them. Madeleine watched their calm, deep reunion with awe and envy. It was like grandmother greeting grandson, like wife meeting husband, complex, multilayered.

She explored fitfully, moodily.

It was obvious to her that the colony was failing.

The people were thin, their skins pale. Malnourished, they were specters in the dim sunlight. People moved slowly, despite the welcoming gentleness of the gravity. Energy was something to be conserved. There was an atmosphere of a prison here. These had once been people of openness, of the endless desert, she reminded herself. Now they were confined here, inside this icy warren. She thought that must be hurting them, perhaps on a level they didn’t appreciate themselves.

There were few children.

The people of Kasyapa were welcoming, but she found they were locked into tight family groups. She would always be an outsider here.

Madeleine spent a lot of time alone, cooped up in her ice-walled box. She engaged in peculiar time-delayed conversations with Nemoto; with a minimum of ten hours between comment and reply, it was more like receiving mail. Still, they spoke. And gradually Nemoto revealed the deeper purpose she had concocted for Madeleine.

“These people are starving,” Nemoto whispered. “And yet they are sitting on a frozen ocean…”

Triton was, Nemoto told her, probably the Solar System’s most remote significant and accessible cache of water, within the Kuiper Belt anyhow. She said that Robert Goddard, the American rocketry pioneer, had proposed — in a paper called “The Last Migration” — that Triton could be used as an outfitting and launching post for interstellar expeditions. “That was in 1927,” Nemoto said.

“Goddard was a farsighted guy,” Madeleine murmured.

“…Even if he got it wrong,” Nemoto was saying — had said, ten hours earlier. “Even if, as it turns out, Triton will be used as a staging post for expeditions from the stars. And not used by us, but by ETs. The Gaijin.”

But the ocean under Madeleine’s feet, tens of kilometers thick, was useless for the colonists as long as it was frozen hard as rock.

“Imagine if we could melt that ocean,” Nemoto said, her face an expressionless mask.

But how? The Sun was too remote. Of course the sunlight could be collected, by mirrors or lenses. But how big would such a mirror have to be? Thousands of kilometers wide, more? Such a project seemed absurd.

“It’s not the way humans work,” Madeleine said gloomily. “Look at the colonists here, burrowing like ants. We’re small and weak. We have to take the worlds as they are given to us, not rebuild them.”

Nemoto’s reply came many hours later. “And yet, that is exactly what we must do if we are to prevail. We are going to have to act more like Gaijin than humans.”

Nemoto had a plan. It involved diverting a moon called Nereid, slamming it into Triton.

Madeleine was immediately outraged. This was arrogance indeed.

But she let Nemoto’s data finish downloading.

It was a remarkable, bold scheme. The rocket engines that had brought the colonists here would now be used to divert a moon. The numbers added up. It could be done, Madeleine realized reluctantly. It would take a year, no more.

It was also, Madeleine thought, quite insane. She pictured Nemoto, stranded centuries out of her time, isolated, skulking in corners of the Moon, concocting mad schemes to hurl outer-planet moons back and forth, an old woman fighting the alien invasion, single-handed.

And yet, and yet…

She looked inward. What is it I want?

All her family, the people she had grown up with, were lost in the past, on a frozen world. She was rootless. And yet she had no pull to join this tight community, had felt no envy of Ben when Lena had recaptured him, on his arrival here. Her life had become a series of episodes, as she’d drifted through scenes of a more-or-less incomprehensible history. Was it even possible to sustain a consistent motivation — to find something to want?

Yes, she realized. It isn’t necessary to be picaresque. Look at Nemoto. She still knows what she wants, the same as she always did, after all these years. Maybe the same applied to Reid Malenfant, wherever he was. And maybe that was why Madeleine was attracted to Nemoto’s projects — not for the worth of the work, but for Nemoto’s singular strength of mind.

She went to discuss it with Ben. His first reaction was like hers.

“What you’re proposing is barbaric,” Ben said. “You talk of smashing one moon into another. You will destroy both.”

“It’s technically feasible. Nemoto’s numbers prove that a deflection of Nereid by the thruster systems from the orbiting transports would—”

“I’m not talking about feasibility. Many things are feasible. That doesn’t make them right. Once Triton is changed, it is changed forever. Who knows what future, wiser generations might have made of these resources we expend so carelessly?”

“But the Gaijin are on their way now.”

“We wreck this world, or they do. Is that the choice you offer?”

“Triton is ours to wreck, not theirs!”

He considered. “I will concede your plan has one positive outcome,” he said at length.

“What?”

“We are barely surviving here. The Yolgnu. That much is obvious. Perhaps with what you intend—”

She nodded. “It will work, Ben.”

“There will be a lot of opposition. People have been living here for generations. This is their home. As it is.”

“I know. It’s going to be hard for all of us.”

“What will you do now?”

She considered. She hadn’t thought it through that far. “We can send probes to Nereid,” she said. “Survey the emplacements of the thrust units, perhaps even initiate the work. Ben, those Gaijin are on their way, whatever we do. If we leave this too long we might not be able to do anything anyhow.” She squinted up at the ice roof, imagining the abandoned ships circling overhead. “We could even begin the deflection, start the thrusters. It will take a year of steady burning to set up the collision. But I’ll initiate nothing irrevocable until you get agreement from your people.”

“You started out your career as a transporter of weapons,” he said sadly. “And you are still transporting weapons.”

That irritated her. “Look, Triton is a lifeless planet. There is nothing here but humans, and what we brought.”

He eyed her. “Are you sure?”

After a couple of months, to Madeleine’s surprise, Lena Roach invited her to “go walkabout,” as she called it, to go see something more of Triton.

Madeleine was a little suspicious. She remained the focus of the colony’s intense debate about its future; few people were so open with her that such offers didn’t come with strings.

She spoke to Ben.

He laughed. “Well, you’re right. Everybody’s got a point of view. Lena has her opinion. But what harm can it do to go out and see some ice?”

Madeleine thought it over for a day.

The Nereid project had begun. Ben had loaned her Kasyapa engineers to detach the engine units from the transport hulks in orbit around Triton, reconfigure them for operation on Nereid, improvise systems to extract fuel from the substance of the moon. She had a small monitoring station set up in her ice cell that showed her, by telemetry and a visual feed, that sparse array of engines burning, twenty-four hours a day, consuming Nereid’s own material as fuel and reaction propellant, slowly, slowly pushing the battered moon out of its looping ellipse. It was good to have a project, to be able to immerse herself in engineering detail.

But she would have a year to wait, even if Kasyapa’s great debate concluded in an acceptance of her program. Ben, torn between his lost family and the endless work of the colony, had little time to spend with her. There were few people here, nowhere to escape, little to do. She still spent much of her time alone, in her ice cell, immersed in virtuals, reading up on the dismal history she had skipped over.

Getting out of here would be a good thing. She agreed to go along with Lena.

So they climbed aboard a surface tractor, a big balloon-tire bubble.

At first they drove in silence, the tractor bouncing gently. Madeleine felt as if she were floating, all but naked, above Triton’s icy ground. The sky was a velvet dome crowded with stars, and with that subtle, misty hull of Neptune riding at the zenith above their heads.

Lena was a small, compact woman, her movements patient and precise. She had been just twenty when Ben had departed for the Saddle Point. Her age was over a hundred and twenty years old, but, thanks to rejuvenation treatments, she might have been forty. But she didn’t act forty, Madeleine thought; she acted old.

The ground was complex. The tractor’s lights showed how the ice was stained pink, as if by traces of blood, and there were streaks of darker material laid over the surface. But here and there the dirty water-ice rock was overlaid by splashes of white, brilliant in the lights; this was nitrogen snow, fresh-fallen.

The land became more uneven. The tractor climbed a shallow ridge, and Madeleine found herself tipped precariously back in her seat. From the summit of the ridge she caught a glimpse of a landscape pocked by huge craters, each some thirty kilometers wide or more. But they weren’t like impact craters; many of them were oval in shape.

The tractor plunged into the nearest crater. The ground broke up into pits and flows, like frozen mud, and the tractor bounced and floated in great leaps.

“This is the oldest surface on Triton,” Lena said. “It covers perhaps a third of the surface. From orbit, the land looks like the surface of a cantaloupe melon, and that gave it its name. But this is difficult and dangerous terrain.” Her accent was odd, shaped by time, sounding strangulated to Madeleine. “These ‘craters’ are actually collapsed bubbles in the ice. They formed when the world froze… You know that Triton was once liquid?”

“After its capture.”

“Yes.”

“Neptune raised great tides in Triton. There was an ocean hundreds of kilometers deep — crusted over by a thin ice layer at its contact with the vacuum — that stayed liquid and warm, for half a billion years, as the orbit became a circle.”

Madeleine eyed her suspiciously. “Life. That’s what you’re getting at. Native life, here in the tidal melt of Triton.” Just as Ben had hinted. She wasn’t surprised, or much interested. Life emerged wherever it could; everybody knew that. Life was a commonplace.

“You know,” Lena said, “when we first came here we spread out from Kasyapa, around this little world.”

“You sang Triton.”

“Yes.” Lena smiled. “We made our roads with orbiting lasers, and we named the cantaloupe hollows and the snow fields and the craters. We were exhilarated, on this empty world. We were the Ancestors! But we grew… discouraged. Nothing moves here, save bits of ice and snow and gas. Nothing lives, save us. There aren’t even bones in the ground. Soon we found we had to ration food, energy, air. We mapped from orbit, sent out robots.”

“Robots don’t sing.”

“No. But there is nothing to sing here…”

Madeleine, with a sudden impulse, covered Lena’s hand with her own. “Perhaps one day. And perhaps there was life in the deep past.”

“You don’t yet understand,” Lena said, frowning. She tapped a control pad and the motor gunned.

The tractor followed complex ridge pathways, heading steadily away from Kasyapa.

They talked desultorily, about planetary formation, Lena’s long life on Triton, Madeleine’s strange experiences among the stars. They were exploring each other, Madeleine thought; and perhaps that was the purpose of this jaunt.

Lena knew, of course, about Ben’s relationship with Madeleine. At length they talked about that, tentatively.

Lena had known about it long before Ben had left for the stars. She knew such things were inevitable, even necessary, in a separation that crossed generations. She herself had taken lovers, even an informal second husband with whom she’d raised children. The ties of galay and dhuwa were, she said, too strong to be broken by mere time and space.

Madeleine found she liked Lena. She still wasn’t sure if she envied Lena the ties she shared with Ben. To be bound by such powerful bonds, for a lifetime of indefinite duration, seemed claustrophobic to her. Perhaps I’ve been isolated too long, she thought.

After some hours they reached a polar cap. It turned out to be a region of cantaloupe terrain where every depression was filled with nitrogen snow. They camped here, near the pole, on the fringe of interstellar space. Overhead, Madeleine saw cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice crystals.

The pole was a dangerous place to walk. She saw evidence of geysers — huge pits blasted clean of snow — and dark streaks across the land, tens of kilometers long, like the remnants of gigantic roads. All of this under Neptune’s smoky light, and a rich dazzle of stars.

This was an enchanting world. Madeleine found herself, reluctantly, falling in love with Triton.

Reluctantly, because, she was coming to realize, she would have to destroy this place.

Lena brought her, on foot, to a small unmanned science station, painted bright yellow so it stood out from the pinkish snow.

“We are running a seismic survey,” she said. “There are stations like this all over Triton. Every time we shake the surface, by so much as a footstep, waves travel through this world’s frozen interior, and we can deduce what lies there.”

“And?”

“You understand that Triton is a ball of rock, overlaid by an ocean — a frozen ocean. But ice is not simple.” Lena picked up a loose fragment of ice and cupped it in her gloved hands. “This form is called ice one. It is the familiar form of ice, just as on Earth’s surface.” She squeezed tighter. “But if I were to crush it, eventually the crystal structure would collapse to an alternative, more closely packed, arrangement of molecules.”

“Ice two.”

“Yes. But that is not the end. There is a whole series of stable forms, reached with increasing pressure, the crystal structure more and more distorted from the pure tetrahedral form of ice one. And so, inside Triton, there are a series of layers: ice one at the surface, where we walk, all the way to a shell of ice eight, which overlays the rocky core…”

Madeleine nodded, not very interested.

The snows seemed to be layered. The deeper she dug with her booted toe, the richer the purple-brown colors of the sediment strata she uncovered. This hemisphere was entering its forty-year spring, and the polar cap was evaporating; thin winds of nitrogen would eventually carry all this cap material to the other pole, where it would snow out. And later, when it was autumn here, the flow was reversed. Triton’s atmosphere was not permanent: It was only the polar caps in transit, from one axis to another.

But Lena was still talking. “…large scale rebuilding of the planet is the same as—”

Madeleine held up her hands. “You left me behind. What are you telling me, Lena?”

“That there is evidence of tampering, planetary tampering, from the deepest past, here on Triton.”

Madeleine felt chilled. “Even here?”

“Just like Venus. Just like Earth. Nothing is primordial. Everything has been shaped.”

That inner layer of ice eight was no crude seam of compressed mush. It was very pure. And it seemed to have been sculpted.

When they got back to the tractor Lena showed Madeleine diagrams, seismic maps. The core had facets — triangles, hexagons — each kilometers wide. “It’s as if somebody encased the core in a huge jewel,” she said. “And it must have been done before the general freezing.”

“Somebody came here,” Madeleine said slowly, “and — somehow, manipulating temperature and pressure in that deep ocean — froze out this cage around the seabed.”

“Yes.”

“And the life-forms there—”

“Immediately destroyed, of course, their nutrient supply blocked, their very cells broken open by the freezing. We can see them, their relics, in the deep samples we have taken.”

Madeleine felt a deep, unreasoning anger well up in her. “Why would anybody do such a thing?”

Lena shrugged. “Perhaps it was not malice. They may have had a mission — insane, but a mission. Perhaps they thought they were helping these primitive Triton bugs. Perhaps they wished to spare the bugs the pain of growth, change, evolution, death. This great crystal structure encodes very little information. You need only a few bits to characterize its composition — pure ice eight — and its regular, repeating structure. It is static, perfect — even incorruptible. Life, on the other hand, requires a deep complexity. It is this complexity that gives us our potential, and our pain. Perhaps, you see, they felt pity…”

Madeleine frowned. “Lena, did Ben encourage you to show me this? Are you trying to persuade me to back off the Nereid project?”

“Ben and I have different experiences,” Lena said. “He traveled to the stars, and saw many things. I worked here, helping to uncover this strange, ancient tragedy.”

Yes. There was no need to go to the stars, Madeleine saw now. It was here, all the time, on Venus and Triton and God-knows-where, and even Earth. The central paradoxical mystery of the universe. Everywhere, life emergent. Everywhere, life crushed. And no explanation why it had to be this way. Over and over.

She felt her anger burn brighter. She had made her own decision. This wasn’t simply what Nemoto wanted. It had become what she wanted. And that burning desire felt good.

Lena smiled, gnomic, wise.

By the time they got back to Kasyapa, the flower-ships had grown in Triton’s sky, until at last their delicate filigree structure was visible, just, with the naked eye. The same fucking Gaijin who had watched as Earth had gone to hell.

She sailed up to orbit, boarded Gurrutu, and headed for Nereid.

Madeleine first sighted Nereid ten days out. It grew rapidly, day by day, finally hour by hour, until its battered gray hide filled the viewing windows.

Rendezvous with the hurtling rock was difficult. The Gurrutu couldn’t muster the velocity change required to match Nereid’s crashing orbit. So Madeleine had to burn her engines and use tethers, harpooning this great rock whale as it hurtled past, letting her ship be dragged along with it. Gurrutu suffered considerable damage, but nothing significant enough to make Madeleine abort.

She entered a loose, slow orbit, inspecting the moon’s surface. Nereid was uninteresting: just a misshapen ball of dirty ice, pocked by craters; it was so small it had never melted, never differentiated into layers of rock and ice like Triton, never had any genuine geology. Nereid was a relic of the past, a ruin of the more orderly moon system that had been wrecked when Triton was captured.

But, despite its small size, it massed as much as 5 percent of Triton’s own bulk. And where Triton’s orbit, though retrograde, was neatly circular, Nereid followed a wide, swooping ellipse, taking almost an Earth year to complete a single one of its “months” around Neptune.

Nereid could be driven head-on into Triton. It would be a useful bullet.

She navigated with automatic star trackers, with radio Doppler fixes on Kasyapa, and by eye, using a sextant. Her purpose was to check the trajectory of the little moon, backing up the automated systems with this on-the-spot eyeballing, which, even now, was one of the most precise navigation systems known.

Nereid was right on the button. But this game of interplanetary pool was played on a gigantic table, and Triton was a small target. Even now, even so close, Nereid could be deflected from its impact.

At times the cold magnitude of the project — sending one world to impact another — awed her. This is too big for us. This is a project for the arrogant ones: the Gaijin, the others who strangled Venus and Triton.

But when she was close enough, she could see the glow of engines on Nereid’s far side: engines built by humans, placed by humans. Placed by her. She clung to her anger, seeking confidence.

Even now Ben debated the ethics of the situation with his people. Most people here had been born long after the emigration: born in the caverns of Kasyapa, now with children of their own. To them, Madeleine and Ben Roach were intruders from the muddy pool at the heart of the Solar System, invaders from another time who proposed to smash their world. The shortness of human lives, she thought. Our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change.

She dozed in her sleeping compartment, a box little larger than she was. Inside, however, tucked into her sleeping bag with the folding door drawn to, she felt comfortable and secure. She would track Nereid as long as she could, guiding it to its destination, unless she was ordered to stand down.

She got a number of direct calls from Nemoto that she did not accept. Nemoto was irrelevant now.

At the very last minute Ben came through.

Somewhat to her surprise, the colonists had agreed to let the project go ahead. Ben would arrange for the temporary evacuation of the colonists from Kasyapa, to the hulks of the old transport ships still in orbit, now drifting without their engines.

“Lena is pleased,” he told her.

“Pleased?”

“By your reaction to the crystal shell around the core. The ice eight. She wanted to make you angry. If the project succeeds then the crystal shell will be destroyed. And the last trace of the native life will surely be destroyed with it.”

Madeleine growled. “I know, Ben. I always knew. The Triton bugs lost their war a long time ago, before they even had a chance to voice an opinion. Their memory should motivate us, not stop us. The crystal builders have gone, but the Gaijin are on their way, here, now. Well, the hell with them. This is the trench we’ve dug, and we aren’t going to quit it.”

“If,” he said, “the Gaijin are the true enemy.”

“They will do for now.”

He smiled sadly. “You sound like Nemoto.”

“None of us age gracefully. Why didn’t you tell me about the native life, Ben?”

His virtual image shrugged. “Not everybody who’s grown up here knows about it. Life is hard enough here without people learning that there is an alien artifact of unknown antiquity buried at the heart of the world.”

She nodded. And yet he hadn’t answered her question. Despite all we’ve been through — even though we’re both refugees from another age, and we traveled to the stars together — I’m not close enough for you to share your secrets.

At that moment, she felt the ties between them stretch, break. Now, she thought, I am truly alone; I have lost my only companion from the past. It was surprising how little it hurt.

“Here is another possibility,” Ben said. “Beyond ethics, beyond this perceived conflict with the Gaijin. You like to meddle, to smash things, Madeleine. You are like Nereid yourself, a rogue body, come to smash our little community. Perhaps this is why the plan is so appealing to you.”

“Perhaps it is,” she said, irritated. “You’ll have to judge my psychology for yourself.”

And with an angry stab, she shut down the comms link.

Alone in Gurrutu, she assembled a complete virtual projection of Triton, a three-dimensional globe a meter across. She looked for the last time at the ice surface of Triton, the subtle shadings of pink and white and brown.

She switched to a viewpoint at Triton’s evacuated equator. It was as if she were standing on Triton’s surface.

Nereid was supposed to do two things: to spin up Triton, and to melt its ancient oceans. Therefore she had steered the moon to come in at a steep angle, to deliver a sideways slap along Triton’s equator. And so, when she turned her virtual head, Nereid was looming low on the horizon: a lumpy, battered moon, visibly three-dimensional, rotating, growing minute by minute.

An icon in the corner of her view recorded a steady countdown. She deleted it. She’d always hated countdowns.

Her imaging systems picked out Gaijin flower-ships in low orbit around the moon, golden sparks arcing this way and that. She smiled. So the Gaijin were curious too. Let them watch. It would be, after all, the greatest impact in the Solar System since the end of the primordial bombardment.

Quite a show. And for once it would be humans lighting up the sky.

The end, when it came, seemed brutally fast. Nereid grew from a spot of darkness, to a pebble, to a patch of rock the size of her hand, to, Jesus, a roof of rock over the world, and then—

Blinding light. She gasped.

The image snapped back to an overview of the moon. She felt as if she had died and come back to life.

A plume of fragments was rising vertically from Triton’s surface, like one last mighty geyser: bits of red-hot rock, steam, glittering ice, some larger fragments that soared like cannonballs.

Nereid was gone.

Much of the little moon’s substance must already have been lost, rock and ice and rich organic volatiles blasted to vapor in that first second of impact: lost forever, lost to space. Perhaps it would form a new, temporary ring around Neptune; perhaps eventually, centuries from now, some of it would rain back on Triton, or some other moon.

This was an astoundingly inefficient process, she knew, and that had been a key objection of some of the Kasyapa factions. To burn up a moon, a whole four-billion-year-old moon, for such a poor gain is a crime. Madeleine couldn’t argue with that.

Except to say that this was war.

And now something emerged from the base of the plume. It was a circular shock wave, a wall of shattering ice like the rim of a crater, plowing its way across the ground. The terrain it left behind was shattered, chaotic, and she could see the glint of liquid water there, steaming furiously in the vacuum and cold. Ice formed quickly, in sheets and floes, struggling to plate over the exposed water. But echoes of that great shock still tore at this transient sea, and immense plates, diamond white, arced far above the water before falling back in a flurry of fragments.

Now, in that smashed region — from cryovolcanoes kilometers wide — volatiles began to boil out of Triton’s interior: nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, water vapor. Nereid’s heat was doing its work; what was left of the sister moon must be settling toward Triton’s core, burning, melting, flashing to vapor. Soon a mushroom of thickening cloud began to obscure the broken, churning surface. Some of the larger fragments thrown up by that initial plume began to hurtle back from their high orbits and burn streaks through Triton’s temporary atmosphere. And when they hit the churning water-ice beneath, they created new secondary plumes, new founts of destruction.

The shock wall, kilometers high, plowed on, overwhelming the ancient lands of ice, places where nitrogen frost still lingered. It was not going to stop, she realized now. The shock would scorch its way around the world. It would destroy all Triton’s subtlety, churning up the nitrogen snows of the north, the ancient organic deposits of the south, disrupting the slow nitrogen weather, destroying forever the ancient, poorly understood cantaloupe terrain. The shock wall would be a great eraser, she thought, eliminating all of Triton’s unsolved puzzles, four billion years of icy geology, in a few hours.

But those billowing ice-volcano clouds were already spreading in a great loose veil around the moon, the vapor reaching altitudes where it could outrun the march of the shattered ice. Mercifully, after an hour, Triton was covered, the death of its surface hidden under a layer of roiling clouds within which lightning flashed, almost continually.

She heard from Ben that the Yolgnu were celebrating. This was Triton Dreamtime, the true Dreamtime, when giants were shaping the world.

After three hours there was a new explosion, a new gout of fire and ice from the far side of the moon. That great shock wave had swept right around the curve of the moon until it had converged in a fresh clap of shattered ice at the antipode of the impact. Madeleine supposed there would be secondary waves, great circular ripples washing back and forth around Triton like waves in a bathtub, as the new ocean, seething, sought equilibrium.

Nemoto materialized before her.

“You improvised well, Madeleine.”

“Don’t patronize me, Nemoto. I was a good little soldier.”

But Nemoto, of course, five hours away, couldn’t hear her. “…Triton is useless now to the Gaijin, who need solid ice and rock for their building programs. But it is far from useless to humans. This will still be a cold world; a thick crust of ice will form. But that ocean could, thanks to the residual heat of Nereid and Neptune’s generous tides, remain liquid for a long time — for millions of years, perhaps. And Earth life — lightly modified anyhow — could inhabit the new ocean. Deep-sea creatures — plankton, fish, even whales — could live off the heat of Triton’s churning core. Triton, here on the edge of interstellar space, has become Earthlike. Imagine the future for these Aborigines,” Nemoto said seductively. “Triton was the son of Poseidon and Aphrodite. How apt…”

This was Nemoto’s finest hour, Madeleine thought, this heroic effort to deflect not just worlds, but the course of history itself. She tried to cling to her own feelings of triumph, but it was thin, lonely comfort.

“One more thing, Meacher.” Virtual Nemoto leaned toward her, intent, wizened. “One more thing I must tell you…”

Later, she called Ben.

“When are you coming home?” he asked.

“I’m not.”

Ben frowned at her. “You are being foolish.”

“No. Kasyapa is your home, and Lena’s. Not mine.”

“Then where? Earth? The Moon?”

“I am centuries out of my time,” she said. “Not there either.”

“You’re going back to the Saddle Points. But you are the great Gaijin hater, like Nemoto.”

She shrugged. “I oppose their projects. But I’ll ride with them. Why not? Ben, they run the only ship out of port.”

“What do you hope to learn out there?”

She did not answer.

Ben was smiling. “Madeleine, I always knew I would lose you to starlight.”

She found it hard to focus on his face, to listen to his words. He was irrelevant now, she saw. She cut the connection.

She thought over the last thing Nemoto had said to her. Find Malenfant. He is dying…

Chapter 23 Cannonball

It had to be the ugliest planet Madeleine had ever seen.

It was a ball the size of Earth, spinning slowly, lit up by an unremarkable yellow star. The land was a contorted, blackened mess of volcano calderas, rift and compression features, and impact craters that looked as if they had been punched into a metal block. Seas, lurid yellow, pooled at the shores of distorted continents. And the air was a thin, smoggy, yellowish wisp, littered with high mustard-colored cirrus clouds.

On the planet there were no obvious signs of life or intelligence: no cities gleaming on the dark side, no ships sailing those ugly yellow oceans. But there were three Gaijin flower-ships in orbit here, Madeleine’s and two others.

Her curiosity wasn’t engaged.

All the Gaijin would tell her about the planet was the name they gave it — Zero-zero-zero-zero — and the reason they had brought her here, across a hundred light-years via a hop-skip-jump flight between Saddle Point gateways in half a dozen systems, a whole extra century deeper into the future: that they needed her assistance.

Malenfant is dying.

Reluctantly — after a year in transit, she had gotten used to her lonely life in her antique Gurrutu hab module — she collected her gear and clambered into a Gaijin lander.

Madeleine stepped onto the land of a new world.

Ridges in the hard crumpled ground hurt her feet. The air was murky gray, but more or less transparent; she could see the Sun, dimmed to an unremarkable disc as if by high winter cloud. Immediately she didn’t like it here. The gravity was high — not crushing, but enough to make her heavy-footed, the bio pack on her back a real burden.

Numbers scrolling across her faceplate told her the gravity was some 40 percent higher than Earth’s. And, since this world was about the same size as Earth, that meant that its density had to be around 40 percent higher too: closer to the density of pure iron.

Earth was a ball of nickel-iron overlaid by a thick mantle of less dense silicate rock. The high density of this world must mean it had no rocky mantle to speak of. It was nickel-iron, all the way from core to surface, as if a much larger world had been stripped of its mantle and crust, and she was walking around on the remnant iron core.

That wasn’t so strange. There are ways that could happen, in the violent early days of a system’s formation, when immense rogue planetesimals continue to bombard planets that are struggling to coalesce. Mercury, the Solar System’s innermost planet, had suffered an immense primordial impact that had left that little world with the thinnest of mantles over its giant core.

At least human scientists had presumed it was primordial. Nobody was sure about such things anymore.

She glanced around the sky. She was a hundred light-years from home, a hundred light-years in toward the center of the Galaxy, roughly along a line that would have joined Earth to Antares, in Scorpio. But the sky was dark, dismal.

There were no asteroid belts, only a handful of comets left orbiting farther out, and two gas giants both stripped of their volatiles, reduced to smooth rocky balls. She was well inside the interstellar colonization wave front that appeared to be sweeping out along the spiral arm and was nearing Earth, a hundred light-years back. And this was a typical post-wave-front system: colonized, ferociously robbed of its resources by one shortsighted, low-tech predatory strategy or another, trashed, abandoned.

Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins.

Earth’s sky was primeval, comparatively. This was a glimpse of the future, for Earth.

She walked farther, away from the lander, which was a silvery cone behind her. She was only a few kilometers from the shore of one of those yellow seas; she figured it was on the far side of a low, crumpled ridge.

She reached the base of the ridge and began to climb. In the tough gravity she was given a good workout; she could feel her temperature rising, the suit’s exoskeletal multipliers discreetly cutting in to give her a boost.

She topped the ridge, breathing hard. A plain opened up before her: shaded red and black, littered by sand dunes and what looked like a big, heavily eroded impact crater. And off toward the smoky horizon, yes, there was that peculiar yellow ocean, wraiths of greenish mist hanging over it. It was a bizarre, surrealist landscape, as if all Earth’s colors had been exchanged for their spectral complements.

And, only a hundred meters from the base of the ridge, she saw two Gaijin landers, silver cones side by side, each surrounded by fine rays of dust thrown out by landing rockets. Beside one of the landers was a Gaijin, utterly still, a spidery statue. Next to the other stood a human, in an exo-suit that didn’t look significantly different than Madeleine’s.

The human saw her, waved.

Madeleine hesitated for long seconds.

Suddenly the world seemed crowded. She hadn’t encountered people since she had last embraced Ben, on Triton. She’d certainly never met another traveler like this, among the stars. But it must have taken decades, even centuries, for the Gaijin to organize this strange rendezvous.

She began to clamber down the ridge toward the landers, letting the suit do most of the work.

The waving human turned out to be a Catholic priest called Dorothy Chaum. Madeleine had met her before, subjective years ago. And inside one of the landers was another human, somebody she knew only by reputation.

It was Reid Malenfant. And he was indeed dying.

Malenfant was wasted. His head was cadaverous, the skull showing through thin, papery flesh, and his bald scalp was covered in liver spots.

Dorothy and Madeleine got Malenfant suited up and hauled him to Dorothy’s lander. In this gravity it was hard work, despite their suits’ multipliers. But Dorothy’s lander had a more comprehensive med facility than Madeleine’s. Malenfant had nothing at all, save what the Gaijin had been able to provide.

Malenfant had grown old and had sunk into himself, like a tide going out, an ocean receding. He had managed to keep himself alive a good few years. But his equipment wasn’t sufficient anymore — and the Gaijin he traveled with sure didn’t know enough about human biology to tinker. Not only that, he was suffering from the Discontinuity.

When he had started to die, the Gaijin were confounded.

“So they sent for us,” Dorothy Chaum said, marveling. “They sent signals out through the gateway links.”

“How did they keep him alive so long?”

“They didn’t. They just preserved him. They bounced his signal around the Saddle Point network, never making him corporeal for more than a few seconds at a time…”

Madeleine studied Malenfant. Had he been aware, as he passed through one blue-flash gateway transition after another, of the light-years and decades passing in seconds?

Malenfant woke up while they were bed-bathing him. Stripped, washed, and immersed in a med tank, he looked Madeleine in the eyes. “Are you qualified to be scrubbing my balls?”

“I’m the best you’re going to find, pal.”

But now he was staring at Chaum, the diagrammatic white collar around her neck. “What is this, the last rites?” He tried to struggle upright, on arms as thin as toothpicks.

Madeleine shoved him back. “It will be if you don’t cooperate.”

He swiveled that gaunt head. “Where’s my suit?”

Dorothy frowned, and pointed to the Gaijin-manufactured envelope they’d bundled up in one corner. “Over there.”

“No,” he whispered. “My suit.”

It turned out he meant his old NASA-era Shuttle EMU, a disgusting old piece of kit almost as far beyond its design limits as Malenfant himself. He wouldn’t relax until Madeleine got suited up, went across to the lander that had brought him here, and retrieved the EMU for him. Then again, it was the only possession he had in the world, or worlds. She could understand how he felt.

He scrabbled in its pockets until he found a faded, much folded photograph, of a smiling woman on a beach.

When they had him in the tank, Madeleine spent a little time working on that gruesome old suit. She could fix the wiring shorts and the cooling-garment tubing leaks, polish out the scratches on the bubble helmet, patch the fabric. But she couldn’t make it absolutely clean again; the dust of many worlds was ingrained too deep into the fabric. And she couldn’t wash out the stink of Malenfant.

All the time, visible through the lander’s windows, that Gaijin sat on the surface, as unmoving as a statue, watching, watching, as if waiting for Dorothy or Madeleine to make a mistake.

While Malenfant was sleeping off twenty subjective years of traveling, Dorothy Chaum and Madeleine took a walk, across the battered iron plain, toward the yellow sea.

They were each used to solitude, and they were awkward, restless with each other — and with the notion that they’d been summoned here, given an assignment by the Gaijin. It didn’t make for good conversation.

Dorothy was a short, squat woman who looked as if she might have been built for this tough, overloaded gravity. She seemed older than Madeleine remembered; her journey here had absorbed more of her subjective lifetime than Madeleine’s had.

They passed the solitary Gaijin sentinel.

“Malenfant calls it Cassiopeia,” Dorothy murmured. “He says it’s been his constant companion since the Solar System.”

“A boy and his Gaijin. Cute.”

Dorothy Chaum’s personal star quest seemed to be a sublimated search for God. That was how it seemed to Madeleine, anyhow.

“I studied the Gaijin on Earth,” Dorothy said. Madeleine could see her smile. “You remember that, on Kefallinia. I got my initial assignment from the Pope… I don’t even know if there is a Pope anymore. The Gaijin have some things in common with us. Sure, they are robotlike creatures, but they are finite, built on about the same scale as we are, and they seem to have at least some individuality. But in spite of their similarity — or maybe because of it — I was immediately overwhelmed by their strangeness. So I was drawn to follow them to the stars, to work with them.”

“And have you discovered yet if a Gaijin has a soul?”

Dorothy didn’t seem offended. “I don’t know if that question has any meaning. Conversely, you see, the Gaijin seem fascinated by our souls. Perhaps they are envious…”

Dorothy stopped dead and held out one hand. Madeleine saw there was some kind of black snow, or a thin rain of dust, settling on the white of her glove palm. “This is carbon,” Dorothy said. “Soot. Just raining out of the air. Remarkable.”

Madeleine supposed it was.

They walked on through the strange exotic air.

Madeleine prompted. “So you traveled with the Gaijin to try to understand.”

“Yes. As I believe Malenfant did.”

“And did you succeed?”

“I don’t think so. What may be more serious,” she said, “is that I don’t think the Gaijin are any closer to finding whatever it is they were seeking.”

They reached the shore of the sea. It was a hard beach, loosely littered with rusty sand and blackened with soot, as if worn away from some offshore seam of coal.

The ocean was very yellow. The liquid was thin, and it seemed to bubble, as if carbonated. Farther out, mist banks hung, dense and heavy. Seeing this garish sea recede to a sharp yellow horizon was eerie.

They stepped forward, letting the liquid lap over their boots. It left a fine gritty scum, and it felt cool, not cold. Vapor sizzled around Madeleine’s feet.

Dorothy dipped a gloved finger into the sea, and data chattered over her visor. “Iron carbonyl,” she murmured. “A compound of iron with carbon monoxide.” She pointed at the vapor. “And that is mostly nickel carbonyl. A lower boiling point than the iron stuff…” She sighed. “Iron compounds, an iron world. On Earth, we used stuff like this in industrial processes, like purifying nickel. Here, you could go swimming in it.”

“I wonder if there is life here.”

“Oh yes,” Dorothy said. “Of course there is life here. Don’t you know where you are?”

Madeleine didn’t reply.

“That’s where the soot and the carbon dioxide comes from,” Dorothy said. “I think there must be some kind of photosynthesis going on, making carbon monoxide. And then the monoxide reacts with itself to make free carbon and carbon dioxide. That reaction releases energy—”

“Which animals can use.”

“Yes.”

“There is life everywhere we look,” Madeleine said.

“Yes. Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too. Emergent monism: a nice label. Though we can scarcely claim understanding…”

They stepped back on the shore and walked farther across the rusty dirt without enthusiasm.

Then they saw movement.

There was something crawling out of the sea. It was like a crab, low and squat, about the size of a coffee table, with a dozen or more spindly legs, and what must be sensors — eyes, ears? — complex little pods on the end of flimsy stalks that waved in the murky air. The whole thing was the color of rust.

And it had a dodecahedral body.

Madeleine could hear it wheezing.

“Lungs,” Dorothy said. “It has lungs. But… look at those slits in the carapace there. Gills, you think?”

“It’s like a lungfish.”

The crab was clumsy, as if it couldn’t see too well, and its limbs slid about over the bone-hard shore. One of those pencil-thin legs caught in a crack and snapped off. That hissing breath became noisier, and it hesitated, waving a stump in the air.

Then the crab moved on, picking its way over the beach, as if searching for something.

Dorothy bent and, fumbling with her gloved fingers, picked up the snapped-off limb. It looked simple: just a hollow tube, a wand. But there was a honeycomb structure to the interior wall. “Strength and lightness,” she said. “And it’s made of iron.” She smiled. “Iron bones. Natural robots. We always thought the Gaijin must have been manufactured, by creatures more or less like us — the first generation of them anyway. It was hard to take seriously the idea of such mechanical beasts evolving naturally. But perhaps that’s what happened…”

“What are you talking about?”

She eyed Madeleine. “You really don’t know where you are? Didn’t the Gaijin tell you?”

Madeleine had an aversion to chatting to Gaijin. She kept her counsel.

“This iron world is Zero-zero-zero-zero, Madeleine,” Dorothy said. “The origin of the Gaijin’s coordinates, the place their own colonization bubble started. The place they came from. No wonder they brought Malenfant here, if they thought he was goingto die.”

Madeleine felt no surprise, no wonder, no curiosity. So what? “But if that’s so, where are they all?”

Dorothy sighed. “I guess the Gaijin are no more immune to the resource wars, and the predatory expansion of others, than we are.”

“Even the Gaijin?” The notion of the powerful, enigmatic, star-spanning Gaijin as victims was deeply chilling.

“If this is a robotic lungfish,” Dorothy said, “maybe life here got pushed back into the oceans by the last wave of visitors. Maybe this brave guy is trying to take back the land, at last.”

The crab thing seemed to have reached its highest point, attained the objective of its strange expedition. It stood there on the rusty beach for long minutes, waving those eyestalks in the air. Madeleine wondered if it even knew they were here. If it recognized the Gaijin as its own remote descendant.

Then it turned and crawled back into the yellow ocean, step by step, descending into that fizzing, smoky liquid with a handful of bubbles.

“The Gaijin are not like us,” Malenfant whispered. He was sitting propped up by cushions in a chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was bird-thin. They had had to bring him back to his own lander; after so long alone he had gotten too used to it, missed it too much. “Cassiopeia is constantly in flux,” he said. “ ‘Cassiopiea’ is just the name I gave her, after all. Her own name for herself is something like a list of catalog numbers for her component parts — with a breakdown for subcomponents — and a paper trail showing their history. A manufacturing record, not really a name. She constantly replaces parts, panels, internal components, switching them back and forth. So her name changes. And so does her identity…”

“Your cells wear out, Malenfant,” Dorothy said gently. “Every few years there is a new you.”

“But not as fast as that. It’s the way they breed, too — if you can call it that. Two or more of them will donate parts, and start assembling them, until you get a whole new Gaijin, who goes off to the storeroom to get the pieces to finish herself off. A whole new person. Now, where does she come from?” He sighed. “They have continuity of memory, consciousness, but identity is fluid for them: You can divide it forever, or even mix it up. You see it when they debate. There’s no persuasion, no argument. They just… merge… and make a decision. But the Gaijin are cautious,” he said slowly. “They are rational; they consider every side of every argument; they sometimes seem paralyzed by indecision.”

“Like Balaam’s ass,” Dorothy said, smiling. “Couldn’t decide between two identical bales of hay.”

“What happened?” Madeleine asked.

“Starved to death.”

Malenfant went on, as if talking to himself. “They aren’t like us. They don’t glom onto a new idea so fast as we do—”

“Their minds are not receptive to memes,” Dorothy said. “They have no sense of self—”

“But,” Malenfant said, “the Gaijin are interested in us. Don’t know why, but they are. And creatures like us: religious types, folks who mount crusades and kill each other and even sacrifice their lives for an idea.”

Madeleine remembered the Chaera, orbiting their black-hole God, futilely worshiping it. Maybe Nemoto had been right; maybe it hadn’t been black-hole technology the Gaijin were interested in, but the Chaera themselves. But why?

Dorothy leaned forward. “Have the Gaijin ever talked about creatures like us? What becomes of us?”

“I gather we mostly wipe ourselves out. Or think ourselves to extinction. Memes against genes. That’s if the colonization wars don’t get us first.” He opened his rheumy eyes. “Earth, the Solar System, might be swept aside by the incoming colonists. It’s happened before, and will happen again. But it isn’t the whole story. It can’t be.”

Dorothy was nodding. “Equilibrium. Uniformity. Nemoto’s old arguments.”

Madeleine didn’t understand.

Malenfant smiled toothlessly at her. “Why does it have to be this way? That’s the question. Endless waves of exploitation and trashing, everybody getting driven back down to the level of pond life… You’d think somebody would learn better. What stops them all?

“If what stopped an expansion was war, you’d have to assume that there are no survivors of such a war — not a single race, not a single breeding population. Or, if intelligent species are trashed by eco collapse, you have to assume that every species inevitably destroys itself that way.

“You see the problem. We can think of a hundred ways a species might get itself into trouble. But whatever destructive process you come up with, it has to be one-hundred-percent effective. If a single species escapes the net… wham! It covers the Galaxy at near light speed.

“But we don’t see that. What we see is a Galaxy that fills up with squabbling races — and then blam. Some mechanism drives them all back down to the pond. There has to be something else, some other mechanism. Something that destroys them all. A reboot.”

“A Galaxy-wide sterilization,” Madeleine murmured.

“And,” Chaum said, “that explains Nemoto’s first-contact equilibrium.”

“Yeah,” Malenfant said. “That’s why they come limping around the Galaxy in dumb-ass ramscoops and teleport gates and the rest, time after time; that’s why nobody has figured out, for instance, how to bust light speed, or build a wormhole. Nobody lasted long enough. Nobody had the chance to get smart.”

Madeleine stood, stretching in the dense gravity of this Cannonball world. She looked out the window at the dismal, engineered sky.

Could it be true? Was there something out there even more ferocious than the world-shattering aliens whose traces humans had encountered over and over, even in their own Solar System? Some dragon that woke up every few hundred megayears and roared so loud it wiped the Galaxy clean of advanced life?

And how long before the dragon woke up again?

“You think the Gaijin know what it is?” Madeleine asked. “Are they trying to do something about it?”

“I don’t know,” Malenfant said. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Madeleine growled. “If they are just as much victims as we are, why don’t they just tell us what they are doing?”

Malenfant closed his eyes, as if disappointed by the question. “We’re dealing with the alien here, Madeleine. They don’t see the universe the way we do — not at all. They have their own take on things, their own objectives. It’s amazing we can communicate at all when you think about it.”

“But,” Madeleine said, “they don’t want to go through a reboot.”

“No,” he conceded. “I don’t think they want that.”

“Perhaps this is the next step,” Dorothy said, “in the emergence of life and mind. Species working together, to save themselves. We need the Gaijin’s steely robotic patience, just as they need us, our humanity…”

“Our faith?” Madeleine asked gently.

“Perhaps.”

Malenfant laughed cynically. “If the Gaijin know, they aren’t telling me. They came to us for answers, remember.”

Madeleine shook her head. “That’s not good enough, Malenfant. Not from you. You’re special to the Gaijin, somehow. You were the first to come out and confront them, the human who’s spent longest with them.”

“And they saved your life,” Dorothy reminded him. “They brought us here, to save you. You were dying.”

“I’m still dying.”

“Somehow you’re important, Malenfant. You’re the key,” Madeleine said. Right there, right then, she had a powerful intuition that must be true.

But the key to what?

He held up skeletal hands, mocking. “You think they’re appointing me to save the Galaxy? Bullshit, with all respect.” He rubbed his eyes, lay on his side, and turned to face the lander’s silver wall. “I’m just an old fucker who doesn’t know when to quit.”

But maybe, Madeleine thought, that’s what the Gaijin cherish. Maybe they’ve been looking for somebody too stupid to starve to death — a little bit like that damn ass.

Dorothy said slowly, “What do you want, Malenfant?”

“Home,” he said abruptly. “I want to go home.”

Madeleine and Dorothy exchanged a glance.

Malenfant had been a long time away. He could return to the Solar System, to Earth, if he wished. But they both knew that for all of them, home no longer existed.