“More than Armstrong,” she muttered. “Thirty feet. Coming down at two. No lateral movement now.” Her voice was thin, but she seemed in control.

A blue glow lit up on the instrument panel, startling Henry. “What’s that?”

“Contact light!”

Geena slapped the ENGINE STOP OVERRIDE button on the panel. The slight vibration of the engine died immediately.

The Shoemaker fell the last few feet, into dust that was already settling.

The four legs hit the ground with a firm thump, that transmitted up his legs to his spine, the Moon itself punching up at his animal bones for his audacity in being here.

Geena went into a flurry of post-landing checks. “Descent engine command override is off. Engine arm off. Control stick out of detent…”

And the dust settled, falling out of the airless spaces around him like so many tiny projectiles, and the stillness of a billion years returned to the Imbrium plain.

Craters and rocks, just a few feet below him now; and under a thin layer of kicked-up dust, he could see footprints, a generation old. He was on the Moon.

“Houston,” Geena said, “this is Aristarchus Base. We have come home.”

PART IV

MOON

1

The sky was dominated by the sun, a white spotlight too bright to look at. The Earth was there in the blackness, bigger than a full Moon but smaller than Geena had expected, just a thumbnail of blue light in the sky. The brightness of the sun made it impossible to make out the stars, and, away from sun and Earth, the sky was just a jet black, empty.

Standing here on the lander platform, she could see all the way to the horizon, clearer than the finest day on Earth. The sculpted hills of the Aristarchus ejecta blanket rose above this puddle of pitted, frozen basalt, their slopes bathed in sunlight, shining like fresh snow.

But there were no visual cues — no trees or cars or buildings or people, not even haze, to help her judge the distance. And beyond the brightly-lit hills at that horizon there was only blackness, like the space at the edge of a map.

She could see the horizon was close, for it curved, gently but noticeably, the way the Earth looked to curve from fifty thousand feet or so. And in fact she could even see how the land before her curved away, dropping like the brow of a hill, out to the horizon. On this lander platform, she could tell she was standing on a ball of rock and dust, suspended in space; the roundness of this world was no intellectual exercise.

She felt lost.

It just didn’t look the same place as from orbit. Most of the shadows she’d used to guide the landing, particularly those pooled at the bottom of the craters, were invisible now. Not only that, she couldn’t see even the larger craters beyond a hundred feet or so, so flattened was the landscape by her perspective.

Maybe there was just a hint of colour. Golds and tans. But it was washed out, as if poking out from under a layer of dust. Shades of concrete, she thought. It was a little like looking out over her driveway, back in Clear Lake, under the glare of the security night lights.

She didn’t share these non-geological thoughts with Henry.

She looked at the sunlight bathing her gloved hand. The fabric of her sleeve glowed with an intense brightness, as if it had just been manufactured. She thought she could feel, in fact, a ghostly trace of the sun’s warmth, seeping through the layers of cloth surrounding her.

But she shivered, under the black sky. She could feel her heartbeat rise, and hoped it didn’t show up on the monitors on the ground.

For it was wrong. How could so much light be falling on her, and not dispel the darkness above? Some ancient part of her brain, adapted for billions of years to life in the pond-like atmosphere of Earth, seemed to be rebelling against these new conditions.

Going to take some getting used to, she thought. That’s all.

She looked past her feet, the way she now had to climb down, in her role as mission commander, to step on the Moon. The Shoemaker’s footpads had settled barely an inch into the ground, and the little ladder, just two or three steps, was resting neatly against the dust.

Geena released her restraints. They rolled themselves up silently into their holders.

She took a step forward, to the edge of the platform. She was at the centre of a radial array of streaks and stripes, the disturbance they’d made in the ancient dust of the Moon as they descended.

She felt giddy, vertiginous. Ridiculous. She’d ridden down from orbit on this contraption, and now here she was three feet above the dust, and she felt dizzy. But even so, she had to hold onto the control post before she got over it.

She turned to Henry. He was still in his restraints, standing calmly, watching her. His oversuit glowed brilliant white in the unfiltered sunlight. He held out a gloved hand to her.

She took it. Their gloves were so thick she could only feel the bulk of his suit, not his flesh and bone within.

Holding on to Henry, she turned, got hold of the handrail, and bent forward. She put her foot on the top rung of the ladder, then the second.

Her suit was stiff. In this Shuttle EMU it was hard to bend, to lower her feet from rung to rung. She found it was easier to push off and just drop down to the next rung, and the next.

She let go of Henry’s hand.

She pushed away one last time, and her hands slid along the rail… and her feet thumped into Moon dust.

A little spray of dust — ancient pulverized rock, charcoal-black — lifted up around her feet, and settled back. Where it touched her clothing, it stuck.

She said: “We’re back. My God, we did it. We’ve come back to the Moon.”

She heard the sounds from Houston, whooping in her headset, some kind of broken-voiced response from Frank Turtle. But the words were remote and didn’t register.

She moved her foot around over the surface. The dust was soft, queasy, but she wasn’t sinking in too far. She took a few steps. A little cloud of dust tracked around her feet, falling back with neat, liquid grace. The dust seemed to have an affinity for her suit, for it clung to her blue overshoes and the fabric of her leggings, as if she was a magnet attracting iron filings.

She looked around.

She was standing on a textured plain — like a piece of the high desert around Edwards, she thought — and the ground glowed in the sunlight. But the sky remained utterly, unnervingly black. Nothing moved here. There was utter silence. She fought an impulse to turn around, to look to see who was creeping up behind her, in this horror-movie stillness.

She took a few more steps, experimentally.

She couldn’t walk, exactly; her legs wouldn’t bend far enough to let her. This Shuttle suit, meant for zero-G EVAs, was even worse than the old Apollo suits for stiffness. She could move in a kind of jog, rocking from side to side, but the low gravity let her travel further than she wanted to go.

And her balance was off. Her backpack pulled at her, and to compensate she leaned forward as she walked; she felt as if she might fall at any moment. She was somewhere between buoyant and heavy. Weight and mass had been redefined for her. It was more comfortable than either a full gravity or zero G: it had much of the buoyancy of microgravity but without that disconcerting lack of up and down. One-sixth G was weak, but enough to anchor her to the world.

But, when she was still, it was hard for her to tell when she was standing upright. The land was full of gentle rises, and there were no verticals here, no telegraph poles or trees or buildings. Something to do with the gentle tug of the Moon’s gravity on her inner ear, maybe.

The backpack’s pumps and fans whirred, and she could feel the soft rush of oxygen over her face. The pack was a reassuring mass on her back, replete with energy, supplies for heat and cooling, water, air; she was a little bubble of Earth life, she thought, bouncing around on the surface of the Moon.