“I think that fits. If a hive gets trapped in a star’s gravity well, for whatever reason, it needs a more energetic propulsion system to escape than a solar sail.”

“But in this case—”

“In this case, the hive got itself more deeply trapped than that.” He stretched out on the floor; there were bruises on his neck, where his suit had caught him during the fall. “So I figured it out. I found what I came to find. The trouble is, it’s no use to us.”

“Why?”

“Because what is suppressing the Moonseed is something inside the wreck of a five-billion-year-old hive at the core of the Moon. Kind of out of reach, don’t you think?”

He bit into his rice cake, and chewed slowly, his expression neutral.

“So what now?”

“Now,” he said, “I do some thinking.”

“Thinking? What the hell is there to think about?”

But he wouldn’t reply. He turned back to his screen, and its light filled his eyes.

His plan, she thought. He is figuring out his plan, the one he won’t tell anyone. Whatever the hell it is, it had better be good.

She persuaded Henry he should sleep.

She watched over him, listening to the whir of the fans and extractors.

She looked out at the Moon’s moulded plains. Alone on the Moon, the only conscious mind in the world, she was driven in on herself.

Time stretched out here, in the Moon’s shallow gravity, she thought.

She touched her face, the lines there, the stiffness of her greying hair. She was, of course, ageing, as was every other member of the human race. Falling helplessly into a black future, hour by hour. And you don’t even, she thought, get a day off for good behaviour.

She checked her watch. The Rolex ticked slowly, steadily. It was 3.00 a.m., Houston time. The morbid hour.

Their human activities were regulated by the constant heartbeat ticks of their Rolexes and timers, the limits of their consumables, the working of their equipment. The chaotic clamour of Earth’s bad news. But that busy human ticking was irrelevant to the grand, slow timescales here, the time of the Moon. A day here lasted a month; she had worked for six or seven hours on the surface, and there had barely been a change even in the angle of the sunlight.

And beneath that there was a still grander timescale, of the slow evolution of the Moon itself. She thought about all she had seen — the ejecta hills, the rille, the crater-sculpted plains — and she knew that she could have come here a billion years before, or a billion years from now, to find basically the same scene.