
lake--but for human colonists it was a treasure beyond price, literally worth far more than its weight in
gold. It was invaluable for the scientists too, as it bore a record of eons of cometary formation, and
offered indirect clues to the formation of Earth's oceans, which had also been bequeathed by cometary
impacts.
Mikhail's interest in this place was not lunar ice, however, but solar fire.
He turned away from the shadows and began to toil up the steepening slope of the rim mountain toward
the light. The path was just a trail, beaten flat by human footprints. It was marked by streetlights, as
everybody called them, small globe lamps hung from poles, so he could see what he was doing.
The slope was steep, each step an effort even in the Moon's gentle one-sixth gravity. His suit helped, with
a subtle hum from exoskeletal servos and a high-pitched whir of the fans and pumps that labored to keep
his faceplate clear of condensed sweat. He was soon breathing hard, and his muscles ached pleasantly:
this walk was his daily constitutional.
At last he reached the summit of the mountain and emerged into flat sunlight. A small collection of robot
sensors huddled here, peering with unending electronic patience at the sun. But the light was too brilliant
for Mikhail's eyes, and his visor quickly opaqued.
The view around him was still more dramatic, and complex. He was standing on the rim of Shackleton,
itself a comparatively minor crater, but here at its western rim Shackleton intersected the circles of two
other craters. The landscape was jumbled on a superhuman scale: even the craters' far rims were hidden
by the Moon's horizon. But with long practice Mikhail had trained himself to make out the chains of
mountains, slowly curving, that marked the perimeters of these overlapping scars. And all this was thrown
into stark relief by the low light of the sun as it rolled endlessly around the horizon, the long shadows it
cast turning like clock hands.
The South Pole, shaped when the Moon was young by an immense impact that had bequeathed it the
deepest crater in all the solar system, was the most contorted landscape on the Moon. A greater contrast
to the flat basalt plain of Tranquillity where Armstrong and Aldrin had first landed, far to the north close
to the Moon's equator, would be hard to imagine.
And this peak was a special place. Even here among the mountains of the Pole, most places knew some
night, as the passing shadows of one crater wall or another blocked out the light. But the peak on which
Mikhail stood was different. Geological chance had left it steeper and a little taller than its cousins to
either side, and so no shadow ever reached its summit. While the Station, only footsteps away, was in
perpetual darkness, this place was in permanent sunlight; it was the Peak of Eternal Light. There was
nowhere like this on tipped-over Earth, and only a handful of locations like it on the Moon.
There was no morning here, no true night; it was no wonder that Mikhail's personal clock drifted away
from the consensus of the rest of the Moon's inhabitants. But it was a strange, still landscape that he had
grown to love. And there was no better place in the Earth–Moon system to study the sun, which never
set from this airless sky.
But today, as he stood here, something troubled him.
Of course he was alone; it was inconceivable that anybody could sneak up on the Station without a
hundred automatic systems alerting him. The silent sentinels of the solar monitors showed no signs of
disturbance or change, either--not that a cursory eyeball inspection of their casings, wrapped in thick
meteorite shielding and Kevlar, would have told him anything. So what was troubling him? The stillness of