…And he felt as if he were drowning, struggling up from some thick, viscous fluid, up toward the light. He wanted to open his mouth, to scream — but he had no mouth, and no words. What would he scream?

I.

I am.

I am Reid Malenfant.

He could see the sail.

It was a gauzy sheet draped across the crowded stars of this place.

Where, Malenfant? Why, the core of the Galaxy, he thought, wonder breaking through his agony.

And within the sail, cupped, he could see the neutron star, an angry ball of red laced with eerie synchrotron blue, like a huge toy.

A star with a sail attached to it. Beautiful. Scary.

Triumph surged. I won, he thought. I resolved the koan, the great conundrum of the cosmos; Nemoto would be pleased. And now, together, we’re fixing an unsatisfactory universe. Hell of a thing.

But if you see all this, Malenfant, then what are you?

He looked down at himself.

Tried to.

A sense of body, briefly. Spread-eagled against the sail’s gauzy netting. Clinging by fingers and toes, monkey digits, here at the center of the Galaxy. A metaphor, of course, an illusion to comfort his poor human mind.

Welcome to reality.

The pain! Oh, God, the pain.

Terror flooded over him. And anger.

And, through it, he remembered the Moon, where it began…

A passenger in the Hope-3 tug, Reid Malenfant descended toward the Moon.

The Farside base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components — habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities — half buried in the cratered plain. Comms masts sprouted like angular flowers. The tug pad was just a splash of scorched moondust concrete, a couple of kilometers farther out. Around the station itself, the regolith was scarred by tractor traffic.

Robots were everywhere, rolling, digging, lifting; Edo was growing like a colony of bacilli in nutrient.

A hi-no-maru, a Japanese Sun flag, was fixed to a pole at the center of Edo.

“You are welcome to my home,” Nemoto said.

She met him in the pad’s air lock: a large, roomy chamber blown into the regolith. Her face was broad, pale, her eyes black; her hair was elaborately shaved, showing the shape of her skull. She smiled, apparently habitually. She could have been no more than half Malenfant’s age, perhaps thirty.

Nemoto helped Malenfant don the suit he’d been fitted with during the flight from Earth. The suit was a brilliant orange. It clung to him comfortably, the joints easy and loose, although the sewn-in plates of tungsten armor were heavy.

“It’s a hell of a development from the old EMUs I wore when I was flying shuttle,” he said, trying to make conversation.

Nemoto listened politely, after the manner of young people, to his fragments of reminiscence from a vanished age. She told him the suit had been manufactured on the Moon, and was made largely of spider silk. “I will take you to the factory. A chamber in the lunar soil, full of immense spinnerets. A nightmare vision!…”

Malenfant felt disoriented, restless.

He was here to deliver a lecture, on colonizing the Galaxy, to senior executives of Nishizaki Heavy Industries. But here he was being led off the tug by Nemoto, the junior researcher who’d invited him out to the Moon, just a kid. He hoped he wasn’t making some kind of fool of himself.

Reid Malenfant used to be an astronaut. He’d flown the last shuttle mission — STS-194, on Discovery — when, ten years ago, the space transportation system had reached the end of its design life, and the International Space Station had finally been abandoned, incomplete. No American had flown into space since — save as the guest of the Japanese, or the Europeans, or the Chinese.

In this year 2020, Malenfant was sixty years old and feeling a lot older — increasingly stranded, a refugee in this strange new century, his dignity woefully fragile.

Well, he thought, whatever the dubious politics, whatever the threat to his dignity, he was here. It had been the dream of his long life to walk on another world. Even if it was as the guest of the Japanese.

And even if he was too damn old to enjoy it.

They stepped through a transit tunnel and directly into a small tractor, a lozenge of tinted glass. The tractor rolled away from the tug pad. The wheels were large and open, and absorbed the unevenness of the mare; Malenfant felt as if he were riding across the Moon in a soap bubble.

Every surface in the cabin was coated with fine gray moondust. He could smell the dust; the scent was, as he knew it would be, like wood ash, or gunpowder.

Beyond the window, the Mare Ingenii — the Sea of Longing — stretched to the curved horizon, pebble-strewn. It was late in the lunar afternoon, and the sunlight was low, flat, the shadows of the surface rubble long and sharp. The lighting was a rich tan when he looked away from the Sun, a more subtle gray elsewhere. Earth was hidden beneath the horizon, of course, but Malenfant could see a comsat crawl across the black sky.

He longed to step through the glass, to touch that ancient soil.

Nemoto locked in the autopilot and went to a little galley area. She emerged with green tea, rice crackers and dried ika cuttlefish. Malenfant wasn’t hungry, but he accepted the food. Such items as the fish were genuine luxuries here, he knew; Nemoto was trying to honor him.

The motion of the tea, as she poured it in the one-sixth gravity, was complex, interesting.

“I am honored you have accepted my invitation to travel here, to Edo,” Nemoto said. “You will, of course, tour the town, as you wish. There is even a Makudonarudo here: a McDonald’s. You may enjoy a bifubaaga ! Soya, of course.”

He put down his plate and tried to meet her direct gaze. “Tell me why I’ve been brought out here. I don’t see how my work, on long-term space utilization, can be of real interest to your employers.”

She eyed him. “You do have a lecture to deliver, I am afraid. But… no, your work is not of primary concern to Nishizaki.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“It is I who invited you, I who arranged the funding. You ask why. I wished to meet you. I am a researcher, like you.”

“Hardly a researcher,” he said. “I call myself a consultant, nowadays. I am not attached to a university.”

“Nor I. Nishizaki Heavy Industries pays my wages; my research must be focused on serving corporate objectives.” She eyed him, and took some more fish. “I am salariman. A good company worker, yes? But I am, at heart, a scientist. And I have made some observations which I am unable to reconcile with the accepted paradigm. I searched for recent scientific publications concerning the subject area of my… hypothesis. I found only yours.

“My subject is infrared astronomy. At our research station, away from Edo, the company maintains radiometers, photometers, photo-polarimeters, cameras. I work at a range of wavelengths, from twenty to a hundred microns. Of course a space-borne platform is to be preferred: The activities of humankind are thickening the Moon’s atmosphere with each passing day, blocking the invisible light I collect. But the lunar site is cheap to maintain, and is adequate for the company’s purposes. We are considering the future exploitation of the asteroids, you see. Infrared astronomy is a powerful tool in the study of those distant rocks. With it we can deduce a great deal about surface textures, compositions, internal heat, rotation characteristics—”

“Tell me about your paradigm-busting hypothesis.”

“Yes.” She sipped her green tea. “I believe I have observational evidence of the activity of extraterrestrial intelligences in the Solar System,” she said calmly.