Once there was a Galaxy over his head, a roof of light, star clusters scattered around it like attending angels. And when he lifted his sun visor, he could see its complex light reflecting from his own cheekbones and nose, the bony frame of his face.

… But it wasn’t right. Not quite.

There was the core, glowing bright, the broad disc, even a hint of spiral structure. But only a hint. There were none of the massive blue-white sparks he’d been able to see in the images their firefly had returned, none of the great supernova blisters, holes blasted into the big molecular clouds by the deaths of giant stars.

Not quite right.

Malenfant hurried on.

Meanwhile Emma grew weaker. She spent longer asleep, and her waking intervals grew shorter. It was as if she was hoarding her energy, hibernating like the black hole farmers of the far downstream. But parsimony hadn’t worked out for the down-streamers. And it wasn’t going to work for Emma.

It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered.

“Wait.”

He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor.

“Emma?”

She licked her lips. “Look. Up there.”

No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?”

Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them — one of them a distinctive red — and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath…

“Holy shit,” he said.

She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.”

And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon.

It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit.

He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed.

It was a footprint.

He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain.

It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.

He looked down at Emma. But, as the sunlight played over her face, she had already closed her eyes. Gently he flipped down her gold visor. The light dazzled from it, evoking rich colors.

Maura Della:

The robot bus snaked across the folded floor of Tycho.

Maura gazed out, stunned, at gray-brown ground, black starless sky, a bright blue Earth, full and round like a blue marbled bowling ball. In the valleys, smooth rocky walls rose around her, hiding the Earth and the details of the land. As the shadows fell on the bus it cooled rapidly, and she heard its hull tick as it contracted, fans somewhere banging into life to keep the air warm for her. But there was light here, even at the bottom of the angular lunar chasms: not diffused by the air, for there was no air, but reflected from the rock walls at the top of the valleys.

The Plexiglas blister window was very clear, cleaned of Moon dust and demisted, and she felt as if she were outside the bus, suspended over the lunar ground. She saw dust, heavily indented by bus tracks that the bus was now following once more with religious precision. The dust was loose, fragile looking, flecked with tiny craters, with here and there the glint of glass. It was lunar soil: dead, processed by patient, airless erosion, passing beneath her feet like foam on a rocky sea. She longed to reach down, through the window, and run her fingers through that sharp-grained dirt.

But that was impossible.

When she had arrived at the dull, cramped, sour-smelling NASA base, dug into the regolith miles from the children’s encampment, she had been told that civilian types like herself weren’t expected to “EVA,” as they called it, to walk outside onto the surface of the Moon. Not once, not one footstep; she would pass over the Moon through an interconnected series of air-conditioned rooms and vehicles, as if the whole Moon were one giant airport terminal.

There were a dozen people in the bus.

Most of them were soldiers: hard-faced, bored men and women, their pressure suit helmets the pale blue of the United Nations. They carried heavy weaponry, rifles and handguns adapted for use either in the vacuum or in atmosphere, and Maura knew there were more weapons, heavier stuff, strapped to the bus’ hull. The sole purpose of this squad was to protect, or perhaps control, Maura. Nobody went to Never-Never Land unarmed or unescorted — not even someone as senior in this UN operation as, five years after Nevada, Maura had become.

Bill Tybee came to stand with her at the window. He was limping, and his silver med-alert lapel brooch glinted in the bus’ lights. He held a bulb of coffee in a polystyrene holder; she accepted it gratefully.

“Umm. Not too hot.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing gets too hot here.”

The low pressure, she thought. An old NASA-type cliche, but true nonetheless.

“Never would have put you down as an astronaut, Ms. Della.”

“Call me Maura. You’re hardly Flash Gordon yourself.”

“Yeah. But what the heck.” Bill Tybee had been brought to the Moon, along with other parents, to work, in his inexpert way, on the interpretation of the Blues’ activities — and, of course, to be with his kids, as best he could. Anything that might work, help get a handle on the kids.

“Bill, why Tycho? Why did the children run here, from Nevada? I heard the NASA people complaining. We’re away from the lunar equator, so you eat a lot of fuel getting here. And the ground is so rugged it was difficult to make the first landings.”

He grunted. “Those NASA guys have their heads up their asses. You have to remember, Ms. Della — Maura. They’re children. At least they were when they flew up here. So where would a kid pick to go live? How about the most famous crater on the Moon?”

It was as good an answer as she’d heard. “Don’t you think they are children any more?”

“Hell, I don’t know what they are,” he muttered. “Look at that.”

The bus climbed a crest, and once more the landscape was set out before her, the blue of Earth garish against the subtle autumn colors of the Moon. The ground was folded and distorted; she could actually see great frozen waves in the rock, ripples from the aftermath of the great impact that had punched the Tycho complex into the hide of the Moon. But the sheets of rock were themselves punctured with craters, small and large, and strewn with rubble.

Tycho was young for the Moon, but unimaginably old by the standards of Earth.

The ride, on the bus’ big mesh wheels, was dreamy; the bus tipped and rolled languidly as it crawled across the broken ground. She felt light, blown this way and that. It was indeed a remarkable experience.

There were rings of security around Never-Never Land, concentric like the rocky terraces that lined the walls of Tycho.

The bus rolled through a tall wire fence — lunar alloy, spun fine — and drove on to a low regolith-covered dome. A fabric tunnel snaked out to meet the bus, like the walkway from an airport terminal, and it docked on the hull with a delicate clunk. When the door opened a uniformed UN soldier stood there, backed up by armed troops, ready to process them.