“We’ve already restarted,” Frank said. “A couple of days and we’ll have recovered.”

“Frank, this isn’t a question of schedule loss,” she said. “It’s the wider impact. Public perception. Come on; you know how important this is. If we don’t handle this right we’ll be shut down.”

He seemed reluctant to absorb that. He was silent for maybe half a minute.

Then his mood switched. He started pacing. “You know, we can leverage this to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to turn this guy we lost — what was his name? — into a hero.” He snapped his fingers. “Did he have any family? A ten-year-old daughter would be perfect, but we’ll work with whatever we have. Get his kids to drop cherry blossom down the hole. You know the deal. The message has to be right. The kids want the bore to be finished, as a memorial to the brave hero. ”

“Frank, the dead engineer was a she.”

“And we ought to think about the Gray angle. Get one of them to call our hero tool pusher a criminal.”

“Frank—”

He faced her. “You think this is immoral. Bullshit. It would be immoral to stop; otherwise, believe me, everyone on this Moon is going to die in the long run. Why do you think I asked you to set up the kids’ clubs?”

“For this?”

“Hell, yes. Already I’ve had some of those chicken-livered investors try to bail out. Now we use the kids, to put so much fucking pressure on it’s impossible to turn back. If that tool pusher had a kid in one of our clubs, in fact, that’s perfect.” He hesitated, then pointed a stubby finger at her face. “This is the bottleneck. Every project goes through it. I need to know you’re with me, Xenia.”

She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then sighed. “You know I am.”

He softened, and dropped his hands. “Yeah. I know.” But there was something in his voice, she thought, that didn’t match his words. An uncertainty that hadn’t been there before. “Omelettes and eggs,” he muttered. “Whatever.” He clapped his hands. “So. What’s next?”

This time, Xenia didn’t fly directly to Edo. Instead she programmed the hopper to make a series of slow orbits of the abandoned base.

It took her an hour to find the glimmer of glass, reflected sunlight sparkling from a broad expanse of it, at the center of an ancient, eroded crater. She landed a kilometer away, to avoid disturbing the flower structures. She suited up quickly, clambered out of the hopper, and set off on foot.

She made ground quickly, over this battered, ancient landscape, restrained only by the Moon’s gentle gravity. Soon the land ahead grew bright, glimmering like a pool. She slowed, approaching cautiously.

The flower was larger than she had expected. It must have covered a quarter, even a third of a hectare, delicate glass leaves resting easily against the regolith from which they had been constructed, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions.

Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for seed-carrying aluminum-burning rockets, perhaps.

“I must startle you again.”

She turned. It was Takomi, of course, in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.

“Life on the Moon,” she said.

“Its life cycle is simple, you know. It grows during periods of transient comet atmospheres — like the present — and lies dormant between such events. The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks down the soil for the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.

“Then, during the night, the leaves act as cold traps. They absorb the comet frost that falls on them, water and methane and carbon dioxide, incorporating that, too, into the flowers’ substance.”

“And the roots?”

“The roots are kilometers long. They tap deep wells of nutrient, water and organic substances. Deep inside the Moon.”

So Frank, of course, was right about the existence of the volatiles, as she had known he would be.

“I suppose you despise Frank Paulis.”

“Why should I?” he said mildly.

“Because he is trying to dig out the sustenance for these plants. Rip it out of the heart of the Moon. Are you a Gray, Takomi?”

He shrugged. “We have different ways. Your ancestors have a word: mechta. ”

“Dream.” It was the first Russian word she had heard spoken in many months.

“It was the name your engineers wished to give to the first probe they sent to the Moon: Mechta. But it was not allowed, by those who decide such things. Well, I am living a dream, here on the Moon: a dream of rock and stillness, here with my Moon flower. That is how you should think of me.”

He smiled and walked away.

The Land was rich with life now: her children, her descendants, drinking in air and Light. Their songs echoed through the core of the Land, strong and powerful.

But it would not last, for it was time for the Merging.

First there was a sudden explosion of Rains, too many of them to count, the comets leaping out of the ground, one after the other.

Then the Land itself became active. Great sheets of rock heated, becoming liquid, and withdrawing into the interior of the Land.

Many died, of course. But those that remained bred frantically. It was a glorious time, a time of death and life.

Changes accelerated. She clung to the thin crust that contained the world. She could feel huge masses rising and falling far beneath her. The Land grew hot, dissolving into a deep ocean of liquid rock.

And then the Land itself began to break up, great masses of it hurling themselves into the sky.

More died.

But she was not afraid. It was glorious! As if the Land itself was birthing comets, as if the Land was like herself, hurling its children far away.

The end came swiftly, more swiftly than she had expected, in an explosion of heat and light that burst from the heart of the Land itself. The last, thin crust was broken open, and suddenly there was no more Land, nowhere for her roots to grip.

It was the Merging, the end of all things, and it was glorious.

Chapter 20

The Tunnel in the Moon

Frank and Xenia, wrapped in their spiderweb space suits, stood on a narrow aluminum bridge. They were under the South Pole derrick, suspended over the tunnel Frank had dug into the heart of the Moon.

The area around the derrick had long lost its pristine theme-park look. There were piles of spill, and waste, and ore that had been dug out of the deepening hole in the ground. LHDs, automated load-haul-dump vehicles, crawled continually around the site. The LHDs, baroque aluminum beetles, sported giant fins to radiate off their excess heat — no conduction or convection here — and most of their working parts were two meters or more off the ground, where sprays of the abrasive lunar dust wouldn’t reach. The LHDs, Xenia realized, were machines made for the Moon.

The shaft below Xenia was a cylinder of sparkling lunar glass. The tunnel receded to the center of the Moon, to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few meters, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Refrigeration and other conduits snaked along the tunnel. It was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.

Momentarily dizzy, she stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Moon.