“Side by side,” said Nick. It didn’t look wide enough.

“You can’t see them both,” she said. “The second grave is here.” A few meters to one side. “It contains the smaller set of remains. Probably a female.”

But there were no marks. No indication. “They weren’t buried at the same time,” he said.

“Bill,” said Hutch, “have you been listening?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us anything more?”

“It looks as if they were interred in robes.”

“Anything else?”

“I would say they died during the same epoch.”

“Can you determine the age of the remains? Roughly? Ballpark figure?”

“It would require exhumation and analysis.”

Nick could see she didn’t think much of that idea. George, though, was all for it.

“I’m sorry. That’s the best I can do.”

“Epochs. You’re suggesting that the remains are old.”

“Oh, yes. There’s no doubt about that. How old, though, I do not know.”

“Now let me be sure I understand this,” said Nick. “We have two sets of remains, both mummified. So they’re both dead a long time.”

“That seems fairly obvious,” said George.

“But one’s in a relatively fresh grave.”

“That also seems to be correct.”

Hutch’s eyes were dark and unreadable in the half-light.

Nick thought about it. “Both died a long time ago. Same era. We know that much. But they didn’t die at the same time.”

George nodded. “The female, the smaller one, if we can assume that, died first. Right? I mean, she must have, because she was buried first.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Nick.

“Presumably, she was buried by her mate,” George continued. “Who died later.”

“And later still, a lot later,” said Hutch, “somebody else came by and buried him.”

THEY WENT OUT to take a closer look at the alien vehicle, Hutch and Nick and George. But it was sealed, and they couldn’t get past the airlock.

“You think anybody would object,” said George, “if we cut our way in?”

He was talking about Hutch, of course. But maybe she was getting worn down. Or maybe she wanted to see the interior of the vehicle herself. In either case, she produced her laser without a word, and pretty soon they were slipping through the hole she’d made in the hatch—

— into a big cabin, with big windows and a big windscreen. And a door in the rear wall. The outside of the windows were covered with dust, so they needed their lamps. But the interior was clean. There were four chairs, including the pilot’s, two each front and back. The seats were hard, of course, slabs of stone, but they looked as if they’d once been soft and accommodating. Behind them, along the back wall, there were storage cabinets, but Nick couldn’t get them open. A long time closed, he guessed.

Hutch was talking to someone on her link, but Nick couldn’t hear anything. That probably meant it was Bill. She nodded a couple of times, and stood so that the imager clipped to her vest provided good pictures of the controls for the bridge monitors.

Nick climbed onto one of the front seats, sitting on it rather than in it, a child in an adult’s chair, legs straight out, console hopelessly out of reach. Hutch finished her conversation and smiled at him. “You won’t touch anything, right, Nick?”

He looked at a board of gauges, press pads, and lamps. “I couldn’t touch anything with a stick,” he said. “Would you know how to take this thing up? Assuming it worked.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t even figured out what kind of power source it uses.”

“I don’t see a wheel,” said George. “Or a yoke.”

Hutch nodded. “Maybe it was operated strictly by AI. Or by voice command.”

“Wouldn’t that be too slow?”

“For a human, yes.”

Nick climbed back down—it was a long way from the seat to the deck—and made a second effort to open one of the storage compartments. This time he succeeded, and he found a bag inside. It, too, might have been made of pliable material at one time, something polished and leather-soft, but like everything else around the complex, it had frozen solid. He pulled it out, but couldn’t get it open. “Clothes, probably,” Hutch said with a smile. “Overnight bag.”

“Overnight bag to where?” Nick looked up at the sky.

“A beach house, maybe.” Her expression suggested anybody’s guess was good. She tried the door in the rear bulkhead. Surprisingly, it opened, and she pushed through. “How about that?” she said.

She began talking to Bill again. Nick looked in and saw half a dozen racked black cylinders, three on either side of the spacecraft. And a series of metal boxes of varying shapes, tied together by cables and ducts.

“The engine?” George asked Nick.

Nick shrugged. “I guess.”

“And some power cells,” said Hutch.

“Vacuum energy?”

“I don’t know. The technology is different from ours. At least, I think it is.”

“Better?”

“I can’t say. Different.”

George had worked his way around in front of the pilot’s seat and was trying to get a look at the controls. “How long has it been here, do you think?”

There was the big question. An airless moon made it hard to figure. It might have been parked a few weeks earlier. Or maybe a hundred thousand years ago.

“There might be a way,” Hutch said. She climbed onto one of the rear seats and peered at the side window. “Hold on.” She crossed the cabin, leaned out through the airlock, and signaled Nick over. “Give me a boost.”

“Where are you going?”

“The roof.”

She climbed onto Nick’s shoulders. He stood at the lip of the airlock while she reached up, found an antenna mount, and hoisted herself atop the cabin. The roof was covered with several centimeters of dust.

“What are we doing?” asked George, not trying to conceal a note of exasperation.

“Cleaning the windows.” She removed her vest and walked toward the front of the spacecraft until she could reach the windscreen. She was looking out over the precipice, and it must have been a giddy moment. Nick thought how the low gravity created the illusion that he could fly.

She went down on one knee, got hold of an antenna to make sure she didn’t slip, and began wiping the windows. When the worst was off, she pressed her fingers against the surface. It was pitted, etched, where grains of dust had buried themselves.

She climbed back down. “The solar wind blows across the moon constantly,” she said. “It probably doesn’t vary very much, so we’re going to assume that it’s a constant. That introduces a degree of unreliability into the test, but I think it’s one we can safely overlook.”

“Good,” said Nick, who thought he saw where she was headed.

“We need close-up pictures for analysis. Of every window in the vehicle. While we’re doing that, I’ll have Bill put together an analysis to determine how much solar wind exists here. When that’s done, he’ll be able to sort out details like composition and velocity. And that will allow us to determine the rate of etching.”

“Etching?” asked George.

“Particle inclusions in the windows. Particles from the solar wind are constantly driven into the plastic. We measure them, we look at flux and quantity, and we ask how long it would take to get that way. The answer tells us how long our lander’s been sitting on the ledge.”

WHILE HUTCH AND George took pictures, Nick descended from the vehicle, strolled past the Memphis lander, and wandered to the far end of the shelf, where it dwindled until it became sufficiently narrow that he had no interest going any farther. The ledge continued indefinitely, eventually curving out of sight.

He looked back at the house. The lights in it were steady. Alyx and Tor had set up lamps, and the sense of burglars moving through a darkened property had been traded off for a warm, half-lit domicile that might have been found along a country road.

Christmas Eve at the most remote place in creation.