The descent orbit burn would put them into a lop-sided ellipse of an orbit with a high point of sixty-nine miles, kissing Arkady’s circular orbit, and after skimming for three hundred miles around the Moon’s lighted face, they would reach a low point of nine miles: just fifty thousand feet high, close enough to touch the mountains of the Moon. And there they would burn their engine again, and fall all the way to the surface.

That was the plan.

There was no air on the Moon. Air would have made it easy, he thought. With air you wouldn’t need all this fuel. You could glide down, like the Space Shuttle returning to Earth, or even batter your way in with a heatshield and fall into the ocean under parachutes, the way the Apollo astronauts used to.

On the Moon, there was nothing to help you down. All you could do was bring along a rocket motor, and all the fuel you needed, and stand on it as it descended, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Like riding an ICBM back down into its silo, Henry thought bleakly, and about as stable. And expensive as all hell, considering the fuel load it took to bring an ounce of payload here…

Shoemaker, on my mark you’ll have twelve minutes to DOI ignition.

“Roger, Frank.”

Shoemaker, Houston, stand by for my mark. Mark. Twelve minutes.

“We copy.”

Shoemaker, Soyuz, this is Houston, three minutes to LOS. You guys look good going over the hill.

Geena said, “Shoemaker, roger.”

Arkady chimed in, “Roger from Soyuz.”

Geena called, “Arkady, have a good time while we’re gone.”

“Yes,” said Arkady. “I won’t get lonesome.”

“And don’t accept any trans-Earth injection updates.”

“Don’t you worry,” said Arkady.

And so on.

It was, Henry knew, the kind of bull pilots always exchanged when hanging out their hides. But, he had to admit, right now he could see it had its purpose. After all, here he was strapped to this table-top, on a craft that couldn’t take him back to Earth. If anything went wrong before the landing, Arkady was going to have to come down and get them, if he could. And after the landing, if the Shoemaker engine failed to restart, there was no way home.

At such a moment, what were they supposed to talk about?

The Moon was starting to reappear as his eyes opened wide: a tableau of craters, ridges and plains, worked in blue and soft grey. He could see shadows, cast by Earth itself.

As he sailed on, the shadows stretched out, and the Moon became a maze, a geometric essay in darkness and blue light. He thought he saw shapes in that unrecognizable surface: cities, artifacts, even gigantic human faces peering up at him, skulls with eye sockets made of dead lunar craters. It was an encounter with the Moon, he thought, but also with himself, with the deep reptilian core of his brain, which truly, really, could not understand where he had brought it.

There was a burst of static in his headset. Loss of signal. Shoemaker and Soyuz were sailing alone over the far side of the Moon.

It was dark: darker than Earth ever was, even over its night side, where you could see the sparkling cities at the rims of continents, and fires in the forest, and the lights of ships on the oceans — even, sometimes, the phosphorescent wakes of the ships, the evidence of tiny living creatures giving up their light to space. Out here, by comparison, there was nothing; and it hit him with a gut realization that there really was nobody out here, nobody to look up and see him crossing the night sky, nobody to help him should he fail.

After a half-hour of utter darkness, he could see fingers of light, gushing across space, obscuring the stars. It was the corona, streamers of gas from the outer atmosphere of the sun, which was itself still hidden by the Moon’s rocky curve.

Slowly the luminous coronal streamers thickened and brightened. They were three-dimensional, he saw, shafts and curtains of light, spread across space. And then he made out waves of light: thin bands of light, snaking around the rim of an invisible circle, suspended between the stars, and the pit of darkness that was the Moon. He was seeing the peaks of the mountains of the Moon, shining in the light of the rising sun.

The band thickened until the sunlight returned without warning, in a finger-snap, turning night to day. Long, spectacular shadows fled across the surface towards him.

Now he was flying over the far side of the Moon. And it didn’t look like the near side.

There were no maria here: at first glance, anyhow. There were basins, just like on the near side, but you had to pick them out from their mountainous ring walls, for they hadn’t filled up with basalt lakes. Nobody knew why.

It was like one giant stretch of highland, craters piled on craters, their overlapping rims like wave crests frozen on a rocky sea. There wasn’t even a sense of scale. It was an unsettling experience. He couldn’t tell where he was, or how high he was, or even what size he was any more. It was as if his sense of space and time was softening, drawn out of him by the ambiguous Moon far side, this land human eyes hadn’t evolved to see.

But here came giant Tsiolkovsky, the most distinctive crater on the whole damn far side of the Moon. Once, NASA had talked of putting an Apollo down, here in Tsiolkovsky, in the middle of the far side, with some kind of superannuated military relay satellite in orbit above it to keep the hapless astronauts in touch with home. Looking down now, he could see how dangerous that would have been, how treacherous Tsiolkovsky was.

“Forty seconds,” Geena said.

“Rog.”

“Press the switch over there. To your right.”

It was mounted on his back frame; he had to reach to get it. “What’s that?”

“The movie camera for the landing. IMAX. Twenty seconds. Engine armed. Pressed to proceed.” She grabbed the handrail. “Two, one.”

Ignition.

Henry could feel the thrust of the engine, silent and invisible as it was; it was like some mysterious gravity field, pulling him down to the surface of the Shoemaker.

The engine, he noted absently, had started up by itself.

“Hey,” he said. “Who’s flying this thing?”

“Autoland,” Geena said tightly.

The engine roared to full thrust, and the Shoemaker platform shook with a soundless, high-frequency vibration. His feet came to rest hard against the Shoemaker’s deck, and after five days in microgravity he welcomed the feel of acceleration.

“We’re burning, Arkady,” Geena said.

“I can see the glow in the engine bell. Godspeed, my friends.”

“Yeah. You too…”

…The ground lurched under Blue Ishiguro.

He’d been up here for hours. He had, he realized, been dozing.

He heard the growl of cracking rock, and he was thrown onto his back. Suddenly there was smoke everywhere, and the air was burning hot. He could see the clouds venting from new fissures, the white of superheated steam, the blue of sulphuric acid and fluorine. The stink was foul, like, he thought darkly, a high-school chemistry lab.

He straightened himself up, and surveyed the new situation.

Fissures had appeared on the flanks of the Campsie Fells. Lava fountains there, curtains of red flame following the lines of the fissures, rock droplets hurled metres into the air. As he watched, the fissures were spreading and merging.

A main vent, a broad crater, opened up in the hillside, facing Strathblane. More lava fountains, and now a major surge of sticky, viscous lava poured out. The heather on the hillside singed and burned in brief flashes. The cooling lava was already building up levees, and the molten material gushed down channels between the levees, heading towards the abandoned town.