Outside the windows they could see the landing field receding, with its blast walls rearing up around it. The maglev accelerated, drew out from the base along a long, curving downhill path and rushed towards the shadowed valley.
‘Our scheduled time of arrival at the hotel is 19.15, and there’s no need for you to bother about your luggage. The robots will take it up to your rooms, and meanwhile we’ll meet in the lobby, get to know the hotel crew, take a look around, and then you’ll have a chance afterwards to freshen up. Dinner will be a little later than usual today, at 20:30. After which I recommend you get some sleep. The journey was fairly strenuous, and you’ll be tired, besides which Neil Armstrong reported having slept exceptionally well on his first night on the Moon. So much for the full moon keeping you awake. Any more questions at the moment?’
‘Just one.’ Donoghue raised a hand. ‘Can we get a drink?’
‘Beer, wine, whisky,’ said Lynn, beaming. ‘All alcohol-free.’
‘I knew it.’
‘It’ll do you good,’ said Aileen happily, and patted his leg.
Donoghue growled something blasphemous, and as if in punishment, darkness swallowed them up. For a while they could still see the top of the crater walls bathed in harsh sunlight, and then these too were lost to view. Nina Hedegaard brought round some snacks. György Ligeti’s Requiem came over the speakers, just the right music for the pitch-black outside, and the downward slope steepened perceptibly while the Lunar Express picked up speed. Black explained that they were in a cleft between Peary and Hermite, then they shot out again into the sunlight, past jagged rock formations and towards a steep-sided hollow. It grew dark again while they passed through a smaller crater. Just a moment ago, Evelyn had been burning to winkle some secrets of family life from Amber, but now all she wanted to do was stare out in wonder at this untouched alien landscape, the archaic brutality of its cliff walls and mountain ridges, the velvet silence that lay over the dust-filled valleys and plains, the complete absence of colour. The cold sunlight fell on the edges of the impact craters, and time itself melted in its glare. Nobody felt like talking any more, and even Chucky stopped short in one of his jokes before the feeble punchline and stared out as though hypnotised. Outside, a blue-white glittering jewel lifted slowly above the horizon, gaining height with every kilometre they travelled south – their home, infinitely far away, and achingly beautiful.
Nina and Black chattered on, informative and enthusiastic. They mentioned the names of further craters, Byrd, Gioja, Main. The peaks dwindled away to hills, the chasms gave way to light-filled plains. After an hour, they reached a long rampart wall, Goldschmidt, its western edge bitten away by the jaws of Anaxagoras, and Nina told them that this was an especially recent impact. A few of them looked upwards, thinking that recent might mean just now, rather than a hundred million years ago, and then coughed or laughed nervously. They crossed Goldschmidt and sped across a desert landscape, this one a darker colour, and Julian stood up and congratulated them on crossing their first lunar sea, the Mare Frigoris.
‘And why do they call a dry old desert like this a sea?’ Miranda asked, saving her more educated fellow passengers the embarrassment of having to ask the same question.
‘Because, earlier, these dark basaltic plains were thought to be seas,’ said Julian. ‘The assumption was that the Moon had to be shaped in much the same way as the Earth was. As a result, people imagined that they could see seas, lakes, bays and swamps. What’s interesting here is how they got their names, for instance why this basin is called the Sea of Cold. There’s the Sea of Tranquillity of course, Mare Tranquillitatis, which has gone down in history thanks to Apollo 11, and by the way that’s why three tiny little craters near the landing site are called Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, credit where it’s due. Then there’s a Sea of Serenity, a Sea of Happiness, a Sea of Clouds and another one of Rain, an Ocean of Storms, the Foaming Sea, the Sea of Waves and so on and so forth.’
‘That sounds like the weather forecast,’ said Hanna.
‘You’ve hit the nail on the head there.’ Julian grinned. ‘It’s all down to a certain Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a seventeenth-century astronomer and contemporary of Galileo. He had the idea of naming every crater and every mountain chain after a great astronomer or mathematician, but then he ran out of astronomers, as luck would have it. Later the Russians and the Americans took over his system. Nowadays you can find writers, psychologists and polar explorers remembered for all time here on the Moon, and there are lunar Alps, Pyrenees and Andes as well. Anyway, as far as Riccioli was concerned, the dark plains had to be seas. Plutarch had already believed this, and Galileo declared that if the Moon was another Earth, then the light patches were obviously continents and the dark parts must be bodies of water. Naturally Riccioli also wanted to give these seas of his names as well – and that’s when he made his big mistake! He reckoned that his observations showed that weather down on the Earth was influenced by the phases of the Moon. For instance, good weather during the waxing moon—’
‘And crappy weather during the waning moon.’
‘That’s it! Since then the seas in the eastern hemisphere on the Moon have had peaceful, harmonious names, while over in the west it never rains but it pours. And a sea up by the North Pole obviously has to be cold, hence Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold. Oh, look at that! I do believe there’s something coming towards us.’
Evelyn craned her neck. At first she saw nothing but the endless plain and the rails curving away into the distance, then it leapt out at her. A tiny point, hurtling closer, that flew towards them over the rails and became something long and low with blazing headlamps. Then the two trains passed at a speed approaching 1500 kilometres per hour, without the least sound or tremor from where they sat.
‘Helium-3,’ said Julian reverentially. ‘The future.’
And he sat down as though there was nothing further to say.
The Lunar Express flew onward. A little later an enormous mountain range showed on the horizon, becoming taller with amazing speed as though the Mare Frigoris really were a sea and the range were rising from its depths. Evelyn remembered hearing from someone that the effect was down to the Moon’s curvature. Black told them that this was the crater Plato, a splendid example with a diameter of more than a hundred kilometres and walls two and a half thousand metres high, another little splinter of information fired into Evelyn’s overloaded cerebral cortex that stuck there. The Lunar Express swooped smoothly into the Mare Imbrium, the neighbouring desert plain. The freight tracks branched off, as announced, and vanished off to the west, while they went around Plato and left it behind. More mountains reared up on the horizon, the Lunar Alps, harsh-lit and shot through with veins of shadow. The rails reared boldly upwards into the mountains, where the pillars that held up the maglev track clasped hold of the steep cliffs like claws. The higher they climbed, the more breathtaking the view: stark peaks two thousand metres tall, overhangs like Cubist sculpture, sharp saw-toothed ridges. One last look down at the dusty carpet of the Mare Imbrium, then the tracks curved away into the sea’s hinterland, between peaks and plateaux and onward to the edge of a lunar Grand Canyon, and then—