“We don’t know. Whatever is there is beyond the level of resolution of our techniques. Certainly subatomic. Its structure changes with time. Its primary resource is olivine. Mantle rock. Whatever is inside the super-quartz shell is presumably the active agent, whatever starts the transformation of the rock the dust settles on.”

“You make it sound like a machine.”

“Maybe it is. Lots of tiny machines, eating olivine, using forces we can’t identify to tweak crystal structures.”

“Machines, inside tiny eggs of rock.”

“The Moon rock as a whole has a greater structure. Silicate again, at first, on the surface, but the density and complexity seems to increase, beyond what we can resolve, towards the centre… It’s a kind of funnel, I think. In three dimensions.”

“A funnel?”

“Building regions of successively greater density and pressure, towards the heart of the rock. I think it has a purpose.”

“What?”

“The compression of matter and energy. Jane, the way to make a new element, to turn matter from one element to another, is to go to high energy density. Atomic nuclei can fuse or fission—”

“Like in a nuclear weapon.”

“Or the heart of the sun. Right.”

“And that’s what creates the miniature explosions,” she said. “When the quicksand spreads.”

“Yes. But they mightn’t be mini fusion explosions. There are higher densities. You can go all the way up to a threshold called the Planck energy—”

Planck energy. “Where all the forces of nature unify. And the strings begin to vibrate in higher modes—”

“Yes.” He studied her. “Where did you hear about string theory?”

She thought. “I heard a TV comment by an American scientist. A physicist called Monica Beus, I think.”

“I know of her.”

“She used string theory to explain the spectrum of the radiation from Venus.”

His eyes narrowed.

She tried to read his face. “Henry, what does this mean? How can there be Planck energy levels in a chunk of Moon rock?”

He shrugged. “The energy itself isn’t so great. It’s about the same as the chemical energy in a tank of automobile gas. The difficulty is that to reach Planckian energy densities you have to focus all that energy on one proton or electron. That’s what we try to do in our supercolliders, but we don’t come anywhere near, not to within factors of hundreds of trillions. The Moon rock structure is a much smarter solution. I think the Moon rock is being turned, particle by particle, into a mini-collider. An energy lens. It’s elegant.”

“How? Who by?”

“I don’t think there’s a who. Unless you call a virus a who.”

“A virus? Not a machine, then? You think this thing is alive? Like a plague?”

“Jane, I’m just a rock jockey. I don’t know what alive means. I’m just speculating about what I’m observing.”