It was a volcanic plume, opening up right under Valentina.

When the ground started to crumble, he didn’t even think about it. He just lunged forward, fists outstretched. It seemed to take an age to arc through Io’s feeble gravity.

He hit her on her shoulders as hard as he could. Despite her greater mass and low center of gravity, she toppled backward and fell away from the vent toward harder ground. She was safe.

Malenfant, on the other hand, was helpless.

He was falling in desperate low-gravity slow-motion, spread-eagled, right down into the center of the vent, which had opened up into a bubbling pit of dark molten sulphur. He could feel the skin of his chest and face blistering, bubbling like the sulphurous ground. Evidently his magic suit wasn’t going to protect him from this one.

He laughed. So it ends here. At least he’d gotten to know the answer. Some of it, anyhow.

There were worse deaths.

The sulphur bubbled up over him, and the pain was overwhelming.

But there was a strong hand at his neck—

After that, only fragments:

Lying flat. No feeling anywhere.

Stars overhead. Vision bouncing. One eye still working? Being carried?

Walls around him, lifting up, a circle of thick-browed faces.

…Oh. A grave. He was the old geezer now. He tried to laugh, but nothing seemed to be working.

A rain of blackness over him. Dirt. It spattered on his chest, his face. Pain stung where it hit exposed flesh. There were hands working above him, big powerful hands like spades, scooping up dirt to throw over him. Valentina’s hands, others.

The dirt landed in his eyes, his mouth. It tasted of bleach.

I’m alive. They’re burying me. I’m alive!

He tried to cry out, but his throat was clogged by dirt. He tried to rise, but his limbs had no strength, as if he was swaddled up in bandages.

The dirt rained on his face, a black sulphurous hail. He couldn’t even move.

There was something in the corner of his vision. A metallic glint.

A flash of electric blue light.

Chapter 28

People Came from Earth

A little before Dawn, Xenia Makarova stepped out of her house into silvery light. The air from her nose frosted white, and the deep Moon chill cut through papery flesh to her spindly bones.

The silver-gray light came from Earth and Mirror in the sky: twin spheres, the one milky cloud, the other a hard image of the Sun. But the light was still dim enough to allow her to see the changed, colonized stars, as well as the fainter stripes of the comets that hailed through the inner system, one after another, echoes of the titanic war being waged on the Solar System’s rim.

And beyond the comets the new supernova — the destructive blossoming of the star the astronomers had once labeled Phi Cassiopeiae — was still brilliant, as bright as Venus perhaps, though dimming. When Xenia had been born such a spectacle, a supernova a mere nine thousand light-years away, would have been a source of great scientific and public interest. Not today, of course, not in the year A.D. 3480.

But now the Sun itself was shouldering above the horizon, dimming even the supernova. Beads of light like trapped stars marked the summits of mountains rimming the shores of Tycho, and a deep bloody crimson was working its way high into the tall sky. Almost every scrap of the air in that sky had been drawn from the heart of the Moon by the great Paulis mines. But now the mines were shut down, the Moon’s core exhausted, and she imagined she could see the lid of the sky, the millennial leaking of the Moon’s air into space.

She walked down the path that led to the circular sea. There was frost everywhere, of course, but the path’s lunar dirt, patiently raked in her youth, was friendly and gripped her sandals. The water at the sea’s rim was black and oily, lapping softly. She could see the gray sheen of pack ice farther out, though the close horizon hid the bulk of the sea from her. Fingers of sunlight stretched across the ice, and gray-gold smoke shimmered above open water.

There was a constant tumult of groans and cracks as the ice rose and fell on the sea’s mighty shoulders. The water never froze at Tycho’s rim; conversely, it never thawed at the center, so that there was a fat torus of ice floating out there around the central mountains. It was as if the rim of this artificial ocean were striving to emulate the unfrozen seas of Earth that bore its makers.

She thought she heard a barking, out on the pack ice. Perhaps it was a seal. And a bell clanked: an early fishing boat leaving port. It was a fat, comforting sound that carried easily through the still, dense air. She sought the boat’s lights, but her eyes, rheumy, stinging with cold, failed her.

She paid attention to her creaking body: the aches in her too-thin, too-long, calcium-depleted bones, the obscure spurts of pain in her urethral system, the strange itches that afflicted her liver-spotted flesh. She was already growing too cold. Mirror returned enough heat to the Moon’s long Night to keep the seas from freezing, the air from snowing out. But she would have welcomed a little more comfort.

She turned and began to labor back up her regolith path to her house.

When she got there, Berge, her grandson, was waiting for her. She did not know then, of course, that he would not survive the new Day.

He was eager to talk about Leonardo da Vinci.

Berge had taken off his wings and stacked them up against the concrete wall of her house. She could see how the wings were thick with frost, so dense the paper feathers could surely have had little play. Even long minutes after landing he was still panting, and his smooth, fashionably shaven scalp, so bare it showed the great bubble profile of his lunar-born skull, was dotted with beads of grimy sweat.

She scolded him even as she brought him into the warmth and prepared hot soup and tea for him in her pressure kettles. “You’re a fool as your father was,” she said. His father, of course, had been Xenia’s son. “I was with him when he fell from the sky, leaving you orphaned. You know how dangerous it is in the pre-Dawn turbulence.”

“Ah, but the power of those great thermals, Xenia,” he said, as he accepted the soup. “I can fly kilometers high without the slightest effort…”

Only Berge called her Xenia.

She would have berated him further, which was the prerogative of old age. But she didn’t have the heart. He stood before her, eager, heartbreakingly thin. Berge always had been slender, even compared to other skinny lunar folk; but now he was clearly frail.

And, most ominous of all, a waxy, golden sheen seemed to linger about his skin. She had no desire to comment on that — not here, not now, not until she was sure what it meant, that it wasn’t some trickery of her own age-yellowed eyes.

So she kept her counsel.

They made their ritual obeisance — murmurs about dedicating their bones and flesh to the salvation of the world — and finished up their soup.

And then, with his youthful eagerness, Berge launched into the seminar he was evidently itching to deliver on Leonardo da Vinci, long-dead citizen of a long-dead planet. Brusquely displacing the empty soup bowls to the floor, he produced papers from his jacket and spread them out before her. The sheets, yellowed and stained with age, were covered in a crabby, indecipherable handwriting, broken with sketches of gadgets or flowing water or geometric figures.

She picked out a luminously beautiful sketch of the crescent Earth…

“No, Xenia,” Berge said patiently. “Not Earth. Think about it. It must have been the crescent Moon.” Of course he was right; she’d lived on the Moon too long. “You see, Leonardo understood the phenomenon he called the ashen Moon — like our ashen Earth, the old Earth visible in the arms of the new. He was a hundred years ahead of his time with that one.”