Frank would become the most famous man on the Moon.

That wasn’t going to help him, though, she thought sadly.

“So,” she said. “You proved your point. Will you stop now?”

“Stop the borehole?” He sounded shocked. “Hell, no. We go on, all the way to the core.”

“Frank, the investors are already pulling out.”

“Chicken-livered assholes. I’ll go on if I have to pay for it myself.” He put the beaker down. “Xenia, the water isn’t enough; it’s just a first step. We have to go on. We still have to find the other volatiles. Methane. Organics. We go on. Damn it, Roughneck is my project.”

“No, it isn’t. We sold so much stock to get through the mantle that you don’t have a majority anymore.”

“But we’re rich again.” He laughed. “We’ll buy it all back.”

“Nobody’s selling. They certainly won’t after you publish this finding. You’re too successful. I’m sorry, Frank.”

“So the bad guys are closing in, huh? Well, the hell with it. I’ll find a way to beat them. I always do.” He grabbed her gloved hands. “Never mind that now. Listen, I’ll tell you why I brought you down here. I’m winning. I’m going to get everything I ever wanted. Except one thing.”

She was bewildered. “What?”

“I want us to get married. I want us to have kids. We came here together, from out of the past, and we should have a life of our own, on this Japanese Moon, in this future.” His voice was heavy, laden with emotion, almost cracking. In the glare of rock light, she couldn’t see his face.

She hadn’t expected this. She couldn’t think of a response.

Now his voice was almost shrill. “You’ve gone quiet.”

“The comet,” she said softly.

He was silent for a moment, still gripping her hands.

“The methane rocket,” she said. “On the comet. It was detected.”

She could tell he was thinking of denying all knowledge. Then he said, “Who found it?”

“Takomi.”

“The piss-drinking old bastard out at Edo?”

“Yes.”

“That still doesn’t prove—”

“I checked the accounts. I found where you diverted the funds, how you built the rocket, how you launched it, how you rendezvoused it with the comet. Everything.” She sighed. “You never were smart at that kind of stuff, Frank. You should have asked me.”

“Would you have helped?”

“No.”

He released her hands. “I never meant it to hit there, on Fracastorius.”

“I know that. Nevertheless, that’s what happened.”

He picked up the glass of lunar water. “But you know what, I’d have gone ahead even if I had known. I needed that fucking comet to kick start this. It was the only way. You can’t stagnate. That way lies extinction. If I gave the Lunar Japanese a choice, they’d be sucking water out of old concrete for the rest of time.”

“But it would be their choice.”

“And that’s more important than not dying?”

She shrugged. “It’s inevitable they’ll know soon.”

He turned to her, and she sensed he was grinning again, irrepressible. “At least I finished my project. At least I got to be a hero… Marry me,” he said again.

“No.”

“Why not? Because I’m going to be a con?”

“Not that.”

“Then why?”

“Because I wouldn’t last, in your heart. You move on, Frank.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. But there was no conviction in his voice. “So,” he said. “No wedding bells. No little Lunar Americans, to teach these Japanese how to play football.”

“I guess not.”

He walked away. “Makes you think, though,” he said, his back to her.

“What?”

He waved a hand at the glowing walls. “This technology isn’t so advanced. Neil and Buzz couldn’t have done it, but maybe we could have opened up some kind of deep mine on the Moon by the end of the twentieth century, say. Started to dig out the water, live off the land. If only we’d known it was here, all this wealth, even NASA might have done it. And then you’d have an American Moon, and who knows how history might have turned out?”

“None of us can change things,” she said.

He looked at her, his face masked by rock light. “However much we might want to.”

“No.”

“How long do you think I have, before they shut me down?”

“I don’t know. Weeks. No more.”

“Then I’ll have to make those weeks count.”

He showed her how to hook her suit harness to a fresh pulley set, and they began the long, slow ride to the surface ofthe Moon.

Abandoned on its bench top at the bottom of the shaft, she could see the covered beaker, the Moon water within.

After her descent into the Moon, she returned to Edo, seeking stillness.

The world of the Moon, here on Farside, was simple: the regolith below, the sunlight that flowed from the black sky above. Land, light, dark. That, and herself, alone. When she looked downsun, at her own shadow, the light bounced from the dust back toward her, making a halo around her head.

The Moon flower had, she saw, significantly diminished since her last visit; many of the outlying petals were broken off or shattered.

After a time, Takomi joined her.

“Evidence of the flowers has been found before,” he said.

“It has?”

“I have, discreetly, studied old records of the lunar surface. Another legacy of richer days past, when much of the Moon was studied in some detail. But those explorers, long dead now, did not know what they had found, of course. The remains were buried under regolith layers. Some of them were billions of years old.” He sighed. “The evidence is fragmentary. Nevertheless I have been able to establish a pattern.”

“What kind of pattern?”

“It is true that the final seeding event drew the pods, with unerring accuracy, back to this site, as you observed. The pods were absorbed into the structure of the primary plant, here, which has since withered. The seeding was evidently triggered by the arrival of the comet, the enveloping of the Moon by its new, temporary atmosphere. But I have studied the patterns of earlier seedings—”

“Triggered by earlier comet impacts.”

“Yes. All of them long before human occupancy began here — just one or two impacts per billion years. Brief comet rains, spurts of air, before the long winter closed again. And each impact triggered a seeding event.”

“Ah. I understand. These are like desert flowers, which bloom in the brief rain. Poppies, rockroses, grasses, chenopods.”

“Exactly. They complete their life cycles quickly, propagate as vigorously as possible, while the comet air lasts. And then their seeds lie dormant, for as long as necessary, waiting for the next chance event, perhaps as long as a billion years.”

“I imagine they spread out, trying to cover the Moon. Propagate as fast and as far as possible.”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Then what?”

“At every comet event, the seedings converge. Just as they did here. These plants work backward, Xenia.

“A billion years ago there were a thousand sites like this. In a great seeding, these diminished to a mere hundred; those fortunate few were bombarded with seeds, while the originators withered. And later, another seeding reduced that hundred to twelve or so. And finally, the twelve are reduced to one. This one.”

She tried to think that through; she pictured the little seed pods converging, diminishing in number. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Not for us, who are ambassadors from Earth,” he said. “Earth life spreads, colonizes, whenever and wherever it can. But this is lunar life, Xenia. And the Moon is an old, cooling, dying world. Its richest days were brief moments, far in the past. And so life has adjusted to the situation. Do you understand?”

“…I think so. But now, this is truly the last of them? The end?”

“Yes. The flower is already dying.”

“But why here? Why now?”

He shrugged. “Xenia, your colleague Frank Paulis is determined to rebuild the Moon, inside and out. Even if he fails, others will follow where he showed the way. The stillness of the Moon is lost.” He sniffed. “My own garden might survive, but in a park, like your old Apollo landers, to be gawked at by tourists. It is a… diminishing. And so with the flowers. There is nowhere for them to survive, on the new Moon, in our future.”