The fuel indicator was a little ticking clock. “Sixty seconds flying time.”

“More than Armstrong,” she muttered. “Thirty feet. Coming down at two. No lateral movement now.” Her voice was thin, but she seemed in control.

A blue glow lit up on the instrument panel, startling Henry. “What’s that?”

“Contact light!”

Geena slapped the ENGINE STOP OVERRIDE button on the panel. The slight vibration of the engine died immediately.

The Shoemaker fell the last few feet, into dust that was already settling.

The four legs hit the ground with a firm thump, that transmitted up his legs to his spine, the Moon itself punching up at his animal bones for his audacity in being here.

Geena went into a flurry of post-landing checks. “Descent engine command override is off. Engine arm off. Control stick out of detent…”

And the dust settled, falling out of the airless spaces around him like so many tiny projectiles, and the stillness of a billion years returned to the Imbrium plain.

Craters and rocks, just a few feet below him now; and under a thin layer of kicked-up dust, he could see footprints, a generation old. He was on the Moon.

“Houston,” Geena said, “this is Aristarchus Base. We have come home.”

PART IV
MOON

1

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

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

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

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

She felt lost.