The silence stretched between them, electric. Her words were shocking, quite unexpected.

But now he saw why she’d brought him here.

Since his retirement from NASA, Malenfant had avoided following his colleagues into the usual ex-astronaut gravy ponds: lucrative aerospace executive posts and junior political positions. Instead, he’d thrown his weight behind research into what he regarded as long-term thinking: SETI, using gravitational lensing to hunt for planets and ET signals, advanced propulsion systems, schemes for colonizing the planets, terraforming, interstellar travel, exploration of the venerable Fermi paradox.

All the stuff that Emma had so disapproved of. You’re wasting your time, Malenfant. Where’s the money to be made out of gravitational lensing?

But his wife was long gone, of course, struck down by cancer: the result of a random cosmic accident, a heavy particle that had come whizzing out of an ancient supernova and flown across the universe to damage her just so… It could have been him; it could have been neither of them; it could have happened a few years later, when cancer had been reduced to a manageable disease. But it hadn’t worked out like that, and Malenfant, burned out, already grounded, had been left alone.

So he had thrown himself into his obsessions. What else was there to do?

Well, Emma had been right, and wrong. He was making a minor living on the lecture circuit. But few serious people were listening, just as she had predicted. He attracted more knee-jerk criticism than praise or thoughtful response; in the last few years, he’d become regarded as not much more than a reliable talk-show crank.

But now, this.

He tried to figure out how to deal with this, what to say. Nemoto wasn’t like the Japanese he had known before, on Earth, with their detailed observance of reigi — the proper manner.

She studied him, evidently amused. “You are surprised. Startled. You think, perhaps, I am not quite sane to voice such speculations. You are trapped on the Moon with a mad Japanese woman. The American nightmare!”

He shook his head. “It’s not that.”

“But you must see that my speculations are not so far removed from your own published work. Like myself, you are cautious. Nobody listens. And when you do find an audience, they do not take you seriously.”

“I wouldn’t be so blunt about it.”

“Your nation has turned inward,” Nemoto said. “Shrunk back.”

“Maybe. We just have different priorities now.” In the U.S., flights into space had become a hobby of old men and women, dreams of an age of sublimated warfare that had left behind only images of charmingly antique rocket craft, endlessly copied around the data nets. Nothing to do with now.

“Then why do you continue to argue, to talk, to expose yourself to ridicule?” she said.

“Because…” Because if nobody thinks it, it definitely won’t happen.

She was smiling at him; she seemed to understand. “The kokuminsei, the spirit of your people, is asleep,” she said. “But in you, and perhaps others, curiosity burns strong. I think we two should defy the spirit of our age.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

“I am seeking to resolve a koan,” she said. “A conundrum that defies logical analysis.” Her face lost its habitual smile, for the first time since they’d met. “I need a fresh look — a perspective from a big thinker, someone like you. And…”

“Yes?”

“I am afraid, I think,” she said. “Afraid for the future of the species.”

The tractor worked its way across the Moon, following a broad, churned-up path. Nemoto offered him more food.

The tractor drew up at an air lock at the outskirts of Edo. A big NASDA symbol was painted on the lock: NASDA for Japan’s National Space Development Agency. With a minimum of fuss, Nemoto led Malenfant through the air lock and into Edo, into a colony on the Moon.

Here, at its periphery, Edo was functional. The walls were bare, of fused, glassy regolith. Ducts and cables were stapled to the roof. People wore plain, disposable paper coveralls. There was an air of bustle, of heavy industry.

Nemoto led him through Edo, a gentle guided tour. “Of course the station is a great achievement,” she said. “No less than ninety-five flights of our old H-2 rockets were required to ferry accommodation modules and power plants here. We build beneath the regolith, for shelter from solar radiation. We bake oxygen from the rocks, and mine water from the polar permafrost…”

At the center of the complex, Edo was a genuine town. There were public places: bars, restaurants where the people could buy rice, soup, fried vegetables, sushi, sake. There was even a tiny park, with shrubs and bamboo grass; a spindly lunar-born child played there with his parents.

Nemoto smiled at Malenfant’s reaction. “At the heart of Edo, ten meters beneath lunar regolith, there are cherry trees. Our children study beneath their branches. You may stay long enough to see ichi-buzaki, the first state of blossoming.”

Malenfant saw no other Westerners. Most of the Japanese nodded politely. Many must have known Nemoto — Edo supported only a few hundred inhabitants — but none engaged her in conversation. His impression of Nemoto as a loner, rather eccentric, was reinforced.

As they passed one group he heard a man whisper, “Wah! Gaijin-kusai.”

Gaijin-kusai. The smell of foreigner. There was laughter.

Malenfant spent the night in what passed for a ryokan, an inn. His apartment was tiny, a single room. But, despite the bleak austerity of the fused-regolith walls, the room was decorated Japanese style. The floor was tatami — rice-straw matting — polished and worn with use. A tokonoma, an alcove carved into the rock, contained an elaborate data net interface unit; but the owners had followed tradition and had hung a scroll painting there — of a dragonfly on a blade of grass — and some flowers, in an ikebana display. The flowers looked real.

There was a display of cherry blossom leaves fixed to the wall under clear plastic. The contrast of the pale living pink with the gray Moon rock was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

In this tiny room he was immersed in noise: the low, deep rumblings of the artificial lungs of the colony, of machines plowing outward through the regolith. It was like being in the belly of a huge vessel, a submarine. Malenfant thought wistfully of his own study: bright Iowa sunlight, his desk, his equipment.

Edo kept Tokyo time, so Malenfant, here on the Moon, suffered jet lag. He slept badly.

Rows of faces.

“How are we to populate the Galaxy? It’s actually all a question of economics.” Over Malenfant’s head a virtual image projected in the air of the little theater, its light glimmering from the folded wooden walls.

Malenfant stared around at the rows of Japanese faces, like coins shining in this rich brown dark. They seemed remote, unreal. Many of these people were NASDA administrators; as far as he could tell there was nobody from Nishizaki senior management here, nominally his sponsors for the trip.

The virtual was a simple schematic of stars, randomly scattered. One star blinked, representing the Sun.

“We will launch unmanned probes,” Malenfant said. Ships, little dots of light, spread out from the toy Sun. “We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists — whatever. The first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn’t matter. Not in the long term.

“The probes will be self-replicating: von Neumann machines, essentially. Universal constructors. Humans may follow, by such means as generation starships. However it would be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis and artificial-womb technology.” He glanced over the audience. “You wish to know if we can build such devices. Not yet. Although your own Kashiwazaki Electric has a partial prototype.”