The sun seemed shrunken and remote, reduced to a pale disc in a milky sky. There was the old Earth. The disc of shadowed world cradled within the arms of the crescent was clearly visible, illuminated more brightly by the Moonlight than he had seen it before. He thought, in fact, he could make out the shape of continents, Africa and west Asia and Europe, and the soft bowling-ball glow, where the Moonlight shone over the Indian Ocean.

It wasn’t such a surprise; the Earth was entitled to be lit up like a Christmas bauble on a tree. For it had a brand new Moon, a Moon that had never been so bright before…

But now clouds closed over the sky.

Earth was gone. He was encased in a glowing fog, sealed under a lid of cloud.

The wind was dying. He was still buffeted by gusts — he imagined the air scouring in great currents over this huge lava plain, the new lands it had conquered, seeking equilibrium — but it wasn’t as violent as before.

And he was still breathing. He could hear, above the diminishing battering of the breeze, the steady hiss of his oxygen supply. Good NASA engineering, conservative to the last.

He tried to stand up.

Jane put down the toy telescope.

The naked-eye Moon was bright: brighter than Jane had ever known it, as bright as if the sun had exploded. It cast a sharp shadow behind her, and the sky, masking the stars, was a deep, lustrous blue she’d never seen before: the new Moonlight, scattered by Earth’s ash-laden air. And the great lantern hanging in the sky shed enough light for her to pick out the details of the landscape, the coast, the sparkling waves. There were colours, she realized: colours by Moonlight.

Actually, it was unearthly.

The very light seemed unnatural: neither full daylight, nor night, nor Moonlight. And the Moon continued to evolve in the sky, a crawling, sparking thing. The Moon wasn’t supposed to change…

But it was wonderful.

Jack’s face, upturned, was shining in the new light. He was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks, the moisture sparkling.

She could hear sounds: dogs barking, birds, the rustle of insects.

The animals think it’s daylight, she realized. It was the opposite of an eclipse. She wondered how long it would take them to adapt to the new world in the sky, to throw off all that evolution.

She shivered.

She could hear people cheering. Clapping, from gardens and patios all over the neighbourhood.

Now there were flashes around the cloud-covered pole of the Moon: sparks, urgent flappings of yellow light, sparking, dying, reforming like trick candles. They were auroras. Lightning strikes. The first storms.

Weather, on the Moon.