Ice whiskers had clustered together to make a carpet as thick as snow on the roads and structures. The drivers on the freeways were very cautious, and seemed to be baffled by such phenomena as ice on their windscreens. De-icer seemed unknown here; Jane felt a little contemptuous, like a Swede mocking British attempts to cope with a few measly inches of snow. The roads were gritted, but with what looked like beach sand. The bridges on the freeways were iced up, pretty deadly, and the traffic was crawling and scared. It was easy to skid as you came off the freeway around those right-angle turns.

She had thought they were safe when they arrived here, at the house Henry had set up for them. Well, maybe they were. But there were power outages that lasted days. The TV had images of plucky Houstoners loading frozen hamburgers onto their summer barbecues… News Lite, the cynics called it.

Anyhow she knew they would have to move soon, Henry’s protection notwithstanding. The Administration was preparing to remove ration privileges for aliens. But Jane knew where she would take Jack: north, into Canada, to the centre of the Shield. The most stable rocks in the continent…

It was a clear night, with only a trace of sunset pink staining the horizon. And the Moon, in the tall Texan sky, was almost full, a dish of light mottled by grey, just as it had always been.

She had brought a small telescope, a child’s toy. She lifted it now.

Jane looked to the upper left corner of the Moon, where Henry had told her he would be, at Aristarchus. It was impossible to comprehend that the Moon was a globe-shaped planet in the sky, that Henry was standing there, perhaps looking back at her.

She clutched Jack, hoping the sky stayed clear of clouds and ash.

Henry was walking on the surface of the Moon.

The Earth was low in the south, God’s blue eyeball in the sky, now lidded by darkness. Maybe Jane was up there, watching, thinking about him.

When he stood in the shadow of the rille wall, he could see stars.

He walked over the undulating ground, through quiet, in the soft rain of starlight.

Geena kept calling the Moon a dead world. She was wrong. It wasn’t dead. It was a world of rocks, of rock flowers and rock forests and rock colours, a subtle, still, Zen-like beauty that would take a lifetime to explore.

The Moon as a giant Zen rock garden. Blue Ishiguro would have enjoyed that thought.