The Moon cared nothing for time. And the longer she stayed, the more her own busy schedules came to seem irrelevant. She felt as if her sense of time was dissolving, stretching like melted candle-wax. Perhaps she could sink down into the Moon’s rhythms. Perhaps if she kept still, she could lie here long enough for the Moon to turn beneath her, and carry her into the night.

Henry seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

In a way, he had what he wanted. And there was the paradox of a scientist. On one level Henry was satisfied. What had driven him in his feverish efforts earlier — what had driven him all the way to the Moon — wasn’t so much fear for himself, a desire to save those he loved, as simple curiosity. Now, Henry had his answer.

But that was too simple. Henry was no one-dimensional Brainiac. She suspected he understood the Moonseed on a level that defied her. And when he contemplated it — its simplicity of operation, its immense timescales, its tenacity, its capacity to destroy worlds — it seemed he felt genuine awe.

She suspected he envied the Moonseed its lack of the complexity that bedevilled human life. Maybe Henry would like to be a half-machine, like the Moonseed.

But even that wasn’t the bottom of the truth, she thought sadly. Because, plumb in the middle of Henry’s life, there you had dippy Jane, his relationship with her based on nothing but — she forced herself to admit it — love.

Maybe she’d never really understood Henry, she thought. Or vice versa. Probably they’d never stood a chance.

She probed at her own feelings. She felt — numb. Bewildered. Maybe she had gone through too much; maybe she was in shock. How were you supposed to feel, when your ex-husband says your species is doomed?

Geena had grown up, in San Francisco, without religion. She’d never felt the need of what she thought of as its ersatz, manipulative comforts. So she had never had the expectancy of surviving her own death.

More than that: she’d grown up with the message of science, which was that humanity had a finite tenure on the planet, come what may. If nuclear war didn’t get you, the eco-collapse would, or the dinosaur killer, or the return of the glaciers, or the extinction of the sun, or… The doom scenario depended only on which timescale you chose to think about.

She was an advocate of space travel. Colonies off the planet would have boosted mankind’s chances of survival. If NASA’s more grandiose plans had come to pass and there were now, say, three or four hundred people living in some kind of Antarctic-type research station on Mars, right now, they wouldn’t have to worry so much about this Moonseed thing.

The Earth might die. Even the Moon. Mankind wouldn’t have to.

But it was too late for that.