He sailed once more into silence.

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

He’d slept well. He felt good.

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

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

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

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

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

He struggled out of his sleeping bag.

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

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

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

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