…I took little Nadezhda out to see the ecopoiesis farms in your old stamping ground of Aristarchus. They tell me they modelled the ecosystems here on the dry valleys of Antarctica, back when there used to be ice caps. Mats of green algae and cyanobacteria, lapping up the sunlight, resistant to the shortage of water and low partial pressure of oxygen, pumping out the oxygen. In some of the more clement areas there are even lichens and mosses, growing out in the open…

The ground here was mud, baked utterly dry, cracked into hexagons the size of dinner plates. No water anywhere, of course. Mud, as far as Henry could see, ocean bottom mud, baked dry and hard as concrete; mud, and sand dunes, and salt flats, and gravel fans, covering this dried-up ocean bed.

…We went to see the Apollo Museum there, at Aristarchus. They put it under a dome and reconstructed a lot of the original landing site, right down to the footprints they repaired from the rain damage they suffered. The day we were there they had Tracy Malone, the daughter of one of the astronauts, unveiling a plaque to her father, along with Geena, your ex-wife, who’s been working on lunar heritage projects now she’s retired. Quite symbolic: a representative of the first wave of lunar travellers, and the second, Geena, surrounded by the likes of us, the third. We introduced ourselves to Geena and she said to say hello. They showed Tracy Malone the place her father wrote her name in the dust with his fingertip. It’s under glass now. She cried a river, and it was a nice moment of closure, but I don’t think anyone had the heart to tell her they had to reconstruct it from the photos…

The sky was just a dome of mud-orange haze. But it wasn’t hard to see his way here, about as bright as an early evening in LA used to be. In fact there was more sunlight than appeared, still enough to sustain agriculture, to feed what was left of the Earth’s population, under the big domes in the old deserts.

Not that there was much left of the Earth’s population, all things considered. And if the stories were true about Siberia — it was said that because of the Venus radiation, and a lot of ancillary shit when the Chernobyl-era reactors out there started to go pop, a new homo species had emerged, viable, unable to interbreed with outsiders — the estimates of surviving human populations might be even further off.

…Nadezhda is going to spend her next break from school working at the Tycho carbon-sequestration pit.

I’ve got mixed feelings about her working there.