“I didn’t know I had so many orifices,” she told Henry.

“Oh, Christ, Jane,” he said, and he sat on the edge of her bed.

After a year on the Moon his gait and movements were clumsy, as if he expected everything around him to happen in slo-mo. She could see where the rigours of reentry to Earth’s atmosphere had left him bruised, around the neck and eyes.

And every pore, every fold in his skin, was etched with deep-ingrained Moon dust.

Still, it was Henry, more dear to her than she had anticipated — and more distressed than she had, somehow, imagined, when she had played through this scene in her head.

“It isn’t so bad,” she said. “Leukaemia. I’m only here for tests; I’ll be out of here soon. I might live for years.”

“But not forever,” he said.

“No. Not forever.”

“It ain’t fair.”

He was trying to handle this, she realized, and she needed to give him time. She’d had more than a year to get used to the idea.

He said, “You never even told me.”

“The NASA psychologists wouldn’t let me. They were worried about your morale, up there on the Moon.”

“Pointy-headed assholes,” he murmured. He took her hand. “But it ain’t fair, whether you told me or not. I did it for you.”

“Did what?”

He shrugged. “Blew up the Moon. Saved mankind. Whatever it was I did it for you, for us. To give us a future.”

“Maybe the NASA shrinks were right, then.”

They fell silent, and started to avoid each other’s eyes.

After all, what were you supposed to say? How’s your cancer? How was life on the Moon?

She dug out a letter from the stack on her bedside table. “I got this from someone called Garry Beus.”

“Beus?”

“Son of Monica Beus? The physicist lady you knew?”

He nodded stiffly.

She said, “She learned about me, through my connection to you, before she died, and told Garry.” She glanced over the letter. “So he wrote to me. Kind thought. He’s in the Air Force here. He’s applying for the astronaut corps, the new Earth-Moon ferry pilot positions they are opening up… He says Monica left a memory box for him. Actually for his children, her grandchildren. Do you think I should do that for Jack?”

But he didn’t reply. When she looked up at him again he was crying, the tears spilling down his cheeks, pooling Moon dust in the lines under his eyes.

3

Ten years later…

Coming inland from the sea, driving north-east from Cape Town on the N1 highway, it took Henry and Jane two hours to drive through the coastal mountains to reach the Karroo itself.