Sparks crawled over the globe: ocean-going vessels, surface cars, low-orbit spacecraft. There were more lights, strung out in lines, on the darkened surface itself: towns and cities, outlining hidden continents. Buildings on the Moon were mostly made entirely of glass; lunar glass, manufactured from deep-lying dehydrated lunar ore, was incredibly strong. From space, all that glass made the cities bright.

But the sun-shadowed hemisphere was not truly dark, for it basked in the light of the Noviy Svet — the Russian-designed solettas, the huge mirror farms built and launched by Boeing and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, artificial suns which cast enough daylight over the shadowed half of the Moon to keep its new air from snowing out in the weeks-long night. The solettas worked well, and anyhow the engineers said the Spin-Up should be completed before the solettas reached the end of their design life.

Not that anybody was confident of predicting when that would be, since the solettas, grown from lunar rock, were the first large-scale application of Moonseed-derived technology.

She could see the cold deserts of the lunar poles, bone-white.

On the Moon, the weather was simple. Sunlight lifted masses of moist warm air over the equator; the air quickly dumped its moisture, in sometimes violent rainstorms, and, displaced by colder, lower layers of air, the hot air drifted to the poles. There it cooled and sank, dry and cold, creating deserts, and joined the circulation back to the equator.

So there you had it. The prevailing winds were hot, dry air coming out of the poles, deflected a little by the Moon’s sluggish spin, shaped and moistened by the bodies of water it passed, the maria and the great crater lakes.

On the Moon, there were no weather forecasters.

She couldn’t remember much of Earth, before the Bottleneck. She found it hard to understand how big it had been, so big there had been room for more than one air circulation cell per hemisphere, so big there had been room for too much weather. Bizarre.

Anyhow, the Moon’s North Pole was the site of something much more interesting than weather, as far as Nadezhda was concerned. It was from the Pole that the great deep-core drilling project had been initiated by the Americans: a thousand-mile shaft designed to reach all the way to the Witch in the Well, the ancient, shattered hive at the heart of the Moon which, until now, had only been visible by seismic probes and neutrino light. And nobody knew what treasures that would bring.