As he sailed on, the shadows stretched out, and the Moon became a maze, a geometric essay in darkness and blue light. He thought he saw shapes in that unrecognizable surface: cities, artifacts, even gigantic human faces peering up at him, skulls with eye sockets made of dead lunar craters. It was an encounter with the Moon, he thought, but also with himself, with the deep reptilian core of his brain, which truly, really, could not understand where he had brought it.

There was a burst of static in his headset. Loss of signal. Shoemaker and Soyuz were sailing alone over the far side of the Moon.

It was dark: darker than Earth ever was, even over its night side, where you could see the sparkling cities at the rims of continents, and fires in the forest, and the lights of ships on the oceans — even, sometimes, the phosphorescent wakes of the ships, the evidence of tiny living creatures giving up their light to space. Out here, by comparison, there was nothing; and it hit him with a gut realization that there really was nobody out here, nobody to look up and see him crossing the night sky, nobody to help him should he fail.

After a half-hour of utter darkness, he could see fingers of light, gushing across space, obscuring the stars. It was the corona, streamers of gas from the outer atmosphere of the sun, which was itself still hidden by the Moon’s rocky curve.

Slowly the luminous coronal streamers thickened and brightened. They were three-dimensional, he saw, shafts and curtains of light, spread across space. And then he made out waves of light: thin bands of light, snaking around the rim of an invisible circle, suspended between the stars, and the pit of darkness that was the Moon. He was seeing the peaks of the mountains of the Moon, shining in the light of the rising sun.

The band thickened until the sunlight returned without warning, in a finger-snap, turning night to day. Long, spectacular shadows fled across the surface towards him.

Now he was flying over the far side of the Moon. And it didn’t look like the near side.

There were no maria here: at first glance, anyhow. There were basins, just like on the near side, but you had to pick them out from their mountainous ring walls, for they hadn’t filled up with basalt lakes. Nobody knew why.

It was like one giant stretch of highland, craters piled on craters, their overlapping rims like wave crests frozen on a rocky sea. There wasn’t even a sense of scale. It was an unsettling experience. He couldn’t tell where he was, or how high he was, or even what size he was any more. It was as if his sense of space and time was softening, drawn out of him by the ambiguous Moon far side, this land human eyes hadn’t evolved to see.