Time

“Emma—”

“Maybe the children know,” she said. “The new children. Michael, wherever he is now. You know. …”

She drifted between sleeping and waking. He soaked a cloth in water and moistened her lips when he could. When she was asleep he infused her with more morphine. There was nothing he could do but watch as her body shut itself down. He had never seen anybody die this way before, up close, peacefully. She actually seemed to be getting more comfortable as the end got closer, as if there were mechanisms to comfort her.

She licked her lips. “You know, I guess we couldn’t manage to live together, but at least we got to die together. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Malenfant. For all the worlds …And wear your damn ribbon. It’s a med-alert. They gave it to you for a reason.”

“I will.”

“You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving me, you never thought about yourself…” She opened her eyes, and smiled. But her eyes were unfocused. Her hand fluttered, and he took it.

“What is it?”

“I saw a light,” she whispered. “Like the phoenixes. The light of creation, all around everything. And I could smell the high desert. Isn’t that strange?”

“Yes. Yes, that is strange.”

“And I think…”

But she was asleep again.

Her breathing changed. It became a gurgle, like a snore: intermittent, deep, very fluid. Her mouth was open, her skin sallow, her face very still.

She stirred once more. She smiled. But, he knew, it was not for him.

He assembled Emma’s suit around her, her helmet and gold visor and gloves and boots. When he was done she looked as if she were sleeping.

He washed his face, drank some water, even managed to eat a little. He recharged his reservoirs and suited up.

He collapsed the shelter. Since it was the last time he would be using it, he folded it up neatly and stowed it away in trooper Tybee’s backpack.

Then he prepared his tethers and pitons and carried Emma around the curve of Cruithne, to the crater where he had found the body of the anonymous soldier. The only sound was his own breathing, the only motion the patient wheeling of the stars and sun and Earth in Cruithne’s splendid sky.

He laid Emma down beside the trooper. She was so light in Cruithne’s toy gravity her body barely made an indentation in the soft regolith.

It was easy to bury the two bodies. He just kicked over the crater wall and loosely shoveled dirt forward with his gloved hands, allowed it to settle over them.

He seemed aware of every detail of the world: the grittiness of the regolith he had spilled on the bodies, the slow tracking of the shadows, the ticks and whirrs of the mechanisms of his suit — the meaningless texture of this, the latest of a parade of meaningless universes.

He ought to say something. He had for Cornelius and Tybee J., after all, and they had died in a much stranger place than this, much farther from home. But he had no words.

He left her there.

For the last time he worked his way around Cruithne, and he stood, tethered, before the portal.

He had searched Tybee’s backpack and had found a grenade: a simple, sleek thing, easily small enough to fit into a glove, with a pull-ring fat enough for a space-suited finger. Ten-second timer, he guessed. He cradled the grenade now, clutching it to his belly.

He had no doubt it would work.

Cruithne turned. Shadows fled toward him, and he was plunged into darkness. He heard pumps clatter and whir in his backpack as his battered suit prepared to fight the cold. He waited until Earth was high above the portal, blue planet over blue artifact.

He pulled the grenade’s ring. Ten, nine, eight.

He started his languid microgravity jump in good time. He would enter the portal headfirst, hands clutched to his chest, over the grenade. The complex, ancient ground of Cruithne slid beneath him.

Then the portal was all around him. He grinned fiercely. Made it, by God. End of story.

Two, one.

There was a blue flash, an instant of searing pain—

Maura Della:

And, on the Moon, it took just six more months for it all to fall

apart.

The scrap of paper had been brought here, all the way to the Moon, by a burly-looking Marine. He looked as if he had been ordered to drag Maura out of here by her hair if necessary.

She fingered the document suspiciously. It was written, by hand, on what looked like authentic White House notepaper, and was signed by the president himself. But she had a lot of trouble with any text that contained phrases like “U.S. Constitution as amended” and “emergency powers.”

Maura Della was ordered to return to Earth — specifically, to submit herself to a Washington court within a couple of weeks. They wanted her to denounce the future. To deny that the information Reid Malenfant gleaned from his Feynman radio came from the future. To deny that the Blue kids were influenced by information from the future.

Of course it wouldn’t be true. But America was run by a gov ernment now that had been elected, essentially, on a platform of removing all this stuff, this madness, from public life.

It was impossible. But they were having a damn good try. An obvious method was to treat it all as a conspiracy by the people who had been close to it all. People like Maura.

But such orders were easy to hand out in executive offices in Washington; this was the Moon, and after three days in space — presumably without proper training or orientation — this poor grunt was green as a lettuce leaf and looked as if he could barely stand up, here in the cold, antiseptic light of the NASA base.

Meanwhile she had heard other rumors that the Witnesses — as they were called — were being recalled for fresh “trials,” whether or not they had already recanted as required. And this time, it was said, when the Witnesses walked into custody, they were not coming out again.

She was still a citizen of the United States. She had always regarded it as her duty to uphold and submit to her country’s laws, whatever she thought of their philosophical basis. Maybe she should pack up her bag and go home with the goon Marine, and submit herself, like Galileo, like Jesus. Maybe it would be an example that might even do some good.

But Maura Della never had been good at turning the other cheek.

She wasn’t without allies, even here. After six months on the Moon she had gotten to know most of the military types, NASA astronauts, and staffers who manned this cramped little base. There was a bunker mentality. At first she’d been the outsider. But she’d taken her turns with the chores, like hand cleaning the hydroponics feed lines. And she had brought them handfuls of fresh-cut grass from Never-Never Land, its green springtime scent making the unimaginative metallic confinement of this base a little more bearable.

All this bridge building had been quite deliberate, of course. And now it wouldn’t be hard for her to get a little protection and assistance, enough to deflect this goon for a couple of hours.

The question was, what to do with those hours.

Never-Never Land, she thought. Anna and the children. That’s where I must go.

Working on automatic, she reached for a bag, started to make mental lists of what she should take. Then, deliberately, she put the bag aside. Just go, Maura, while — if — you still have the chance.

She stepped out of her cupboard-sized personal quarters and headed through the complex toward the bus docking port.

Bill Tybee was there looking lost, hurt, frightened, fingering his silver med-alert pin. He was carrying a light, transparent briefcase that contained a set of big chunky plastic toys. For Bill, this had begun as just another working day. “Maura? What’s going on? They won’t let me on the bus.”

“Take it easy,” she told Bill. “We’ll sort this out…”

There was a military officer, a woman, blocking the way to the bus. She had her weapon exposed, and her hand lay on its stock. She looked young and scared and uncertain. It took Maura five minutes of patient negotiation, a mixture of reassurance and veiled threats, to get them both past the officer and onto the bus.

Maura and Bill were alone here in this autonomous Moon bus. As the minutes wore away to the bus’ appointed departure time they sat on a bench and held hands in silence.

Maura could think of any number of ways they could be stopped. But they weren’t. Maybe, for once, the frustrating layers of security here were working in her favor. When things went wrong fast, like this, nobody knew what the hell was going on because nobody knew whom they were supposed to be able to talk to.

And in the meantime her own need to reach the children grew to an overwhelming obsession. That was the center of things, and that surely was where her duty — her deepest duty, embedded deep in whatever morality she had left — must lie now.

Maybe this is how Bill Tybee, a parent, feels all the time, she thought. She felt a prickle of envy.

At last the bus doors slid closed. Maura waited for the soft clunk of the docking tunnel disconnecting from the hull of the bus, and then came the jolt as the bus pulled away and drove itself off through the Moon’s marshmallow gravity.

The sun was high, and unfiltered light, harsh and static, flooded down into the complex canyons and crevasses of the brutally folded surface of Tycho.

Bill was shaking, sweat clustering on his forehead in great low-G beads. She got up and brought him a plastic cup of water. Slowly he calmed down. For now they were safe. You couldn’t mount a car chase through this ancient, hazardous maze of canyons. Besides, the military presence on the Moon remained small; she doubted the commanders would risk any kind of surface operation to intercept them en route to Never-Never Land.

Anyway there was no need. All that was necessary was to wait until Maura and Bill arrived at Never-Never Land and take them out then; there was, after all, no other place to go.

Well, she would deal with that eventuality when it came.

Bill pointed upward. “Look.”

A star was crossing the sky with ponderous slowness. It seemed to be sparkling, pulsing with light with slow regularity. It was, of course, artificial: a satellite, slowly rotating, new, bigger than anything she had seen before. She had absolutely no idea what its purpose might be.

She found herself shivering, and she clutched Bill’s arm.

Strange lights in the sky, she thought. Scary. Even if we put them there.

Especially if we put them there.

It proved easier, oddly, to get into Never-Never Land than to get out of the NASA base. The troopers here seemed to be operating under radio silence. And besides, as Maura herself was quick to point out, once they were inside Never-Never Land they were effectively under house arrest anyhow. What were they going to do, climb out of a window?

So she was admitted. Bill had to wait in the bus.

At first glance nothing had changed here. The dome glowed its daytime sky blue, sun and Earth hung there like lanterns, and the grass was a livid green, almost shocking to the senses after the