She imagined faces all over the darkened hemisphere of the planet, in shattered homes and refugee camps, turned up to the new Moon, which hung in the sky bright as a sun: a symbol of hope, inchoate yet, but nevertheless real. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. For the first time in many days, her soul was lifted above her own concerns, her fears for Jack.

She lifted the telescope again, but now her own vision was blurred with tears.

His suit bent at the waist, comparatively easily. The suit was still pressurized, above ambient — but now there was air out there, not just vacuum; he wasn’t a starfish any more.

It was hard to see out of his gold sun-visor, though. It had been scoured and starred comprehensively by that first wave of fragments. But when he raised it, his helmet remained clear.

There was a soft sound, a gentle tap, on his helmet. Another on his shoulder. And his chest.

The pattering came more steadily now. And when he looked around he could see new craters being dug into the battered regolith, little pits a couple of inches wide, all around him.

He tipped back and raised his face to the hidden sky.

Raindrops, falling towards his face.

It wasn’t like rain on Earth. This was Moon rain.

The biggest drops were blobs of liquid a half-inch across. They came down surrounded by a mist of much smaller drops. The drops fell slowly, perhaps five or six feet in a second. The drops were big flattened Frisbees of liquid, flattened out by air resistance. They caught the murky light, shimmering.

When the drops hit his visor, they impacted with a fat, liquid noise; their splash was slow and languid. The drops spread out rapidly, or else collapsed into many smaller, more compact droplets over the plexiglass.

He stood up. He stood in Moon rain, the first for five billion years, wishing it could go on forever.

He leaned forward, compensating for the mass of his pack, and looked down. As it hit the ground, each raindrop broke up into many smaller drops, which trickled rapidly into the regolith, turning it to mud.

PART V
BOTTLENECK

1

A day later…

Well, after a day, the Moon hadn’t exploded, but outside the lava tube, the wind and rain kept on. The roof of the inflatable shelter sagged, because it couldn’t sustain its own weight over the pressure of the new air outside. It made getting around harder; Henry had to shove billows of fabric out of his face the whole time. It was irritating.

They were both hot and miserable, and they bickered.

But then the rain stopped, or at least tailed off a little. They could hear it, even inside the shelter.

So Henry was going to get to go outside, to explore the new Moon. He felt like a kid, waking up on the morning after a snow fall.