Geena shivered.

He turned to her. “You okay?”

“I think so.”

Her voice sounded thin… and then he realized that he was hearing her, her voice faintly transmitted by the thin new air.

“How about that. I can hear you.”

“What?”

“Never mind. You shivered.”

“It’s just being out here,” she said. “In the open.”

“And not on Earth. I understand. We’re the first humans to walk around unsheltered like this, on another world, in all our history. We’ve had nothing to prepare us for this. If you weren’t scared—”

“It would prove I’m even more unimaginative than you think already?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“You’re so patronizing, Henry.”

She walked away from him, her feet leaving great glopping craters in the mud. After three paces she slipped, and landed on her butt with a slow-motion splash; gobbets of mud sprayed up around her.

Henry knew, absolutely, imperatively, he must not laugh.

She growled. “Probably the low gravity. Reduced friction.”

“Probably.”

“Watch your step, Henry.”

“Copy that.”

They powered up the comms unit, and set up its low-gain antenna. They put headphones to their ears, and Geena started sending an automated telemetry feed; Henry could hear static, and the chatter of the telemetry.

For long minutes, there was no reply.

“Don’t give up,” Geena said doggedly.

“Yeah. There’s a lot of electrical activity in this atmosphere. It must be hard to punch a signal through—”

The static broke up. It was replaced by a chaotic noise.

At first Henry thought they were picking up the crackle of lightning from some remote storm — could an ionosphere have formed here so quickly? Then his mind resolved the sound.

Cheering.

It was human voices, raised in cheers and whoops, either at Korolyov, or Houston, or both; he couldn’t tell, and right now didn’t care.

His eyes prickled. As if he was the one who had just found a planet full of people who were alive after all, and not the other way around. Damn it.

They climbed the rille wall.

It was a lot harder than it had been before. The thirsty regolith had soaked up the rainwater to a depth Henry hadn’t anticipated, and the wall had pretty much turned to a shallow slope of slippery mud. It was impossible to get a footing, or to grip with gloved hands, and they slipped back almost as much as they made headway. After a few minutes, Henry dumped his mud-caked gloves in frustration, despite Geena’s admonitions.

Eventually Geena found a way of zigzagging up the slope, like a mountain path: it was longer, but her footing held in the low G long enough for her to take each step and climb a little further.

Henry sought a more direct route. One of the many landslips had exposed a gutter of lunar bedrock. Henry found he was able to run at this, scrambling at the rock to get purchase before his feet slid out from under him, until, by sheer momentum, he’d reached the top of the rille.

Side by side, panting so hard their oxygen masks were steamed up, they stared out over the Moon’s new landscape.

It was a drab, muddy plain.

The sky was a steel-grey lid, laden with water-vapour clouds, clamped over this subtly curving sheet of red-brown mud. Here and there, Henry could still make out the overlapping craters which had populated this landscape — some of them had filled up with water, so the land was dotted with circular lakes, rippling sluggishly — but many of the crater walls had slumped. It was like standing in the flood plain of some unruly river.

The landscape was all but unrecognizable from the way it had been just a couple of days earlier.

A wind moaned, soft but guttural. And he thought he could hear thunder, somewhere around the curve of the world — maybe halfway round the planet, he thought; this was still a small world.

Geena was working her way around the Lunar Rover. It was a sorry sight: half tipped up into a flooded crater, its aluminum surfaces streaked with mud, its wire-mesh wheels sunk deep into the soggy surface. The big umbrella-shaped S-band antenna had slumped to the dirt, under the weight of the water which had pounded into it.

Geena got hold of the control column and tried to lift the Rover out of the mud.

“It wouldn’t work now even if you dug it out,” Henry said. “Those wheels—”

“I know.” She peaked a hand over her eyes and looked east, towards the old Apollo site. “We ought to go over there,” she said. “I bet the rain has made a hell of a mess.”

“I bet.”

“The flag, for instance—”

He bent down and was pulling off his boots.

She said, “And what the hell are you doing now?”

“What does it look like?”

“Are you crazy?”

“No.” He placed one bare foot into the mud, then another. He wriggled his toes, and felt the mud ooze between his toes. “Feels like river bottom mud. When I used to go fishing with my brother as a kid—”

“Spare me the cornball reminiscences.”

He eyed her. “Back off, Geena. I’m in no danger. What do you think is going to happen to me? I’ll step on a stinging nettle? The Moon might be wet, but it’s still dead.”

“Except for the Moonseed.”

“Except for the Moonseed, and that doesn’t count right now…”

The light changed, subtly; it became a little brighter, and for the first time Henry made out shadows, around the steeper of the muddy mounds.

Geena was looking up at the sky. “Wow.”

He turned and looked. The clouds had parted: through shreds of cumulus, Henry made out a lacing of higher, streaming cirrus, and there was the Earth, a thin crescent, huge and pale — and there, directly above, was a patch of blue sky.

Blue sky, on the Moon.

Well, of course it’s blue, he thought. The Moon gets the same strength sunlight as Earth. The light is scattered by the same sized particles as on Earth…

“All we need is a rainbow,” Geena said.

“Yeah.”

On impulse, he lifted his facemask. His ears popped, as his oxygen rushed out; he took a single, deep sniff of the air.

Geena rushed up to him. “Are you crazy?”

He dropped his mask back into place. “Probably.” He took deep breaths. “But I’m okay.”

“What did you do that for?”

“I wanted to smell it. To smell the Moon.”

“And?”

He stared around, at the subsiding mud. “Wood smoke,” he said. “It smelled of wood smoke.”

The regolith was oxidizing, even as comet water soaked into it. All around him, all over its surface, the Moon was slowly burning.

They walked further, across the blank, muddy plain.

Henry looked at the empty sky, which was closing over once more. “How long do you figure before they come to get us?”

“It depends how long it takes to assemble another mission,” she said. “At least a month, I’d think; we used up both the prototype Shoemaker landers. They’d have to build more, and—”

He shook his head. “You’re not thinking. Those landers won’t work any more. The air, remember? You don’t need to bring rocket fuel for the descent; you could just glide down. There are going to be strong winds for a while, though. And we’ll need a new design, a way to get back off the surface through this thick air…”

She nodded. “Months, then.”

“At least. Still, resupply will be easy. They can drop stuff by aerobrake and parachute. I don’t think they will let us starve.”

“Or X-38s,” she said. “Space Station escape gliders.”

“Yeah…”

He looked at her sideways. It was hard to read her behind her mask. She still seemed brittle, to him.

Fear and grief, he thought, the loss of Arkady, the pummelling of the terraforming. But it barely showed, at her surface.

Maybe she was in shock. Or maybe it just showed how little he knew her, he thought gloomily.

“We’ll get through this, you know,” he told her.