Those two cones stood, side by side, almost like termite mounds. The shallow light fell on them gracefully. She saw that the lines on the ground curved to wash around the cones, like a stream diverting around islands of geometry.

“Thank you for respecting the garden.”

She jumped at the sudden voice. She turned.

A figure was standing there — man or woman? A man, she decided, shorter and slimmer than she was. He wore a shabby, much-patched suit.

He bowed. “Sumimasen. I did not mean to startle you.”

“Takomi?”

“And you are Xenia Makarova.”

“You know that? How?”

A gentle shrug. “I am alone here, but not isolated. Only you sought and compiled information on the Moon flowers.”

“What flowers?”

He walked toward her. “This is my garden,” he said.

“A Zen garden.”

“You understand that? Good. This is a kare sansui, a waterless stream garden.”

“Are you a monk?”

“I am a gardener.”

She considered. “Even before humans came here, the Moon was already like an immense Zen garden: a garden of rock and soil.”

“You are wise.”

“Is that why you came here? Why you live alone like this?”

“Perhaps. I prefer the silence and solitude of the Moon to the bustle of the human world. You are Russian.”

“My forebears were.”

“Then you are alone here also. There are some of your people on Mars.”

“So I’m told. They won’t respond to my signals.”

“No,” he said. “They won’t speak to anybody. In the face of the Gaijin onslaught, we humans have collapsed into scattered, sullen tribes.”

Onslaught. It seemed a strange word to use, stronger than she had expected. Briefly, she was reminded of somebody else, another reclusive Japanese.

She pointed. “I understand the ridges represent flow. Are those mountains? Are they rising out of cloud, or sea? Or are they diminishing?”

“Does it matter? The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. Perhaps they are both falling and rising. You have traveled far to see me. I will give you food and drink.”

He turned and walked across the Moon. After a moment, she followed.

The abandoned lunar base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components — habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities — half buried in the cratered plain. There were robots everywhere, but they were standing silent, obviously inert.

But a single lamp burned again at the center of the old complex. Takomi lived at the heart of Edo, in what had once been, he said, a park, grown inside a cave dug in the ground. The buildings here were dark, gutted, abandoned. There was even, bizarrely, an ancient McDonald’s, stripped out, its red-and-yellow plastic signs cracked and faded. A single cherry tree grew, its leaves bright green, a splash of color against the drab gray of the fused regolith.

This had been the primary settlement established by the Japanese government, back in the twenty-first century. But Nishizaki Heavy Industries had set up in Landsberg, using the crater originally as a strip mine. Now, hollowed out, Landsberg was the capital of the Moon, and Edo, cramped and primitive, had been abandoned.

She clambered out of her suit. She had tracked in moondust. It clung to the oils of her hand and looked like pencil lead, shiny on her fingers, like graphite. It would be hard to wash out, she knew.

He brought her green tea and rice cake.

Out of his suit Takomi was a small, wizened man; he might have been sixty, but such was the state of life-extending technology it was hard to tell. His face was round, a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes were lost in leathery folds; he spoke with a wheeze, as if slightly asthmatic.

“You cherish the tree,” she said.

He smiled. “I need one friend. I regret you have missed the blossom. I am able to celebrate ichi-buzaki here. We Japanese like cherries; they represent the old Samurai view that the blossom symbolizes our lives. Beautiful, but fragile, and all too brief.”

“I don’t understand how you can live here.”

“The Moon is a whole world,” he said gently. “It can support one man.”

Takomi, she learned, used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old salvage, was slow and power-intensive, but the electrolysis process was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn’t short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.

He operated what he called a grizzly, an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same color as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight. It scraped up loose surface material and pumped out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square meters a day. Over time, the grizzly had built a solar farm covering square kilometers and producing megawatts of electric power.

“It is astonishing, Takomi.”

He cackled. “If one is modest in one’s request, the Moon is generous.”

“But even so, you lack essentials. It’s the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen—”

He smiled at her. “I admit I cheat. The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water.”

“You mine concrete?”

“It is better than paying water tax.”

“But how many humans could the Moon support this way?”

“Ah. Not many. But how many humans does the Moon need? Thus, I am entrenched.”

It struck her as another strange choice of word. There was much about this hermit she did not understand, she realized.

She asked him about the contrails she had seen, their convergence on this place. He evaded her questions and began to talk about something else.

“I conduct research, you know, of a sort. There is a science station, not far from here, which was once equipped by Nishizaki Heavy Industries. Now abandoned, of course. It is — was — an infrared study station. It was there that a Japanese researcher called Nemoto first discovered evidence of Gaijin activity in the Solar System, and so changed history.”

She wasn’t interested in Takomi’s hobby work in some old observatory. But there was something in his voice that made her keep listening.

“So you use the equipment,” she prompted.

“I watched the approach of the comet. From here, some aspects of it were apparent that were not visible from Nearside stations. The geometry of the approach orbit, for example. And something else.”

“What?”

“I saw evidence of methane burning,” he said. “Close to the nucleus.”

“Methane?”

“A jet of combustion products.”

A rocket. She saw the implications immediately. Somebody had stuck a methane rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, burned the comet’s own chemicals, to divert its course.

Away from the Moon? Or toward it?

And in either case, who?

“Why are you telling me this?”

But he would not reply, and a cold, hard lump of suspicion began to gather in her gut.

Takomi provided a bed for her: a thin mattress in an abandoned schoolhouse. Children’s paintings adorned the walls, preserved under a layer of glass. The pictures showed flowers and rocks and people, all floating in a black sky.

In the middle of the night, Frank called her. He was excited.

“It’s going better than we expected. We’re just sinking in. Anyhow the pictures are great. Smartest thing I ever did was to insist we dump the magnesium alloy piping, make the walls transparent so you can see the rocks. We have the best geologists on the Moon down that fucking well, Xenia. Seismic surveys, geochemistry, geophysics, the works. The sooner we find some ore lode to generate payback, the better…”