The children had just celebrated their eleventh birthdays when an idea occurred to Perry.

(Their birthday was April 10th. He and Z had agreed that they should be “started” in late June, the year before, so that they would be born at the start of fairly warm weather.

“Gestation, if that's what we'll call it,” he had asked the reflection, “will still take nine months?”

“Yes.”

As for knowing what day it was in the first place, he had worked that out, again with Z’s help, in his first month after exiting the case:

“Listen, you know this planet and its orbit pretty well, right?”

“We do, yes.”

“Can you tell me when its axis, its northern axis, tilts most directly toward the sun? Right now we must be in late spring or early summer, so it can’t be too far off. I suppose I could figure it out myself by knocking a stake into the ground. Or I could make a sundial, and then see – what, when the sun is most directly overhead? But I’d have to be able to compare measurements at exactly noon for that, wouldn’t I? Or would I? Or I guess it would just be – when the stake casts the shortest shadow?”

“The point of orbit you are speaking of will happen nine days from now,” Z answered.

“Really? Like, nine nights to go, and then we are – tilting as directly toward the sun as we ever do?”

“Yes.”

“So that makes today – ” he counted to himself – “June 12th. Okay, then.”

He added:

“Although I could just call the solstice June 1st. Or July 1st. I’m not sure why it ever made sense to have it be the 21st, anyway. If I bump it up to July 1st, then, let’s see, autumn would start October 1st; winter, January 1st – that would be strange, I guess. Could be June 1st, September 1st, December 1st, and then March 1st for spring . . . which could be pretty cold and miserable, still. Hmm. Maybe I’ll just leave it the way it was.

“It’s not like anyone’s going to complain,” he added.)

For the children’s birthdays, he had made them a cake. This had always been a challenge – he had been doing this since they were three – since they had no sugar. There was always honey to be found, though; he retrieved it by using the zhranmin flying robots. The first time, he had seen bees coming out of a dead standing tree trunk, and directed the robots to it. After that, he had been able to just tell them to find and bring back honey, and they had done so.

He also had the robots grind flour for him, and he obtained yeast by putting grape skins into it.

(“Guys,” he had told them when they were three, “Z and the robots help us a lot, but someday we’re going to have to figure all this out ourselves. We’ll have to mill wheat. And we’ll have to figure out how to get honey without getting stung. Or stung too much. Climb up to the hive around dawn is how to do it, I think. We have our work cut out for us.”

“Z has great big eyes,” William said.

“Okay, right. I’ll bring this up again when you’re older.”)

But in addition to the honey bread cake, he realized he might be able to give the four of them an amazing present. It would take some time to organize.

*

“Z,” he said, just outside the ship. “I’m coming up.”

“Of course.”

Once inside, he said:

“Listen, I’ve just remembered something you said a long time ago. You said that humans had made settlements on the Moon, and on Mars.”

“That’s correct.”

“So, there’s nothing left here on Earth, of course. Nothing I can show the kids here beyond a layer of flattened plastic trash in the soil, or whatever. And you’ve said that even the Pyramids have weathered away. But any structures on the Moon are probably still there, right? And same goes for Mars.”

“They are, yes.”

“Unless they’ve been hit by meteors. And I assume there have been some of those – no atmosphere – but still, any structures are probably largely intact.”

“Again, yes they are.”

“Can this ship still fly? Can it lift off from Earth?”

“This ship cannot,” Z answered. “But we could build one that could. One that could fly as far as the Moon.” The reflection paused. “Not Mars, however. Not safely. And the flight to Mars, even if we could, would take a month. One way. I believe that would be a strain on the children.”

“Of course. But the Moon? Could we take them up there? It would be safe, right?”

“We would make it safe, yes.” The reflection paused to think, again.

“I would recommend,” it resumed, “building a large window into the ship, and landing next to the human structures on the Moon, rather than exiting the ship to walk around them. That would require isolation clothing.”

“Space suits.”

“Yes. Those would be – much more time-consuming to make. And their safety would be more difficult to guarantee if they were walking around up there.”

“Okay, well, that would be good enough. And you’ll be able to send out some of the robots to get inside, I suppose? Although for that matter, you could probably just send them from here, and we could watch in the ship, remotely . . . ” Perry shook his head. “But no, going up there would be amazing for them.”

“I will design and build the ship,” Z said.

“Very good. How long will it take?”

A pause.

“It will take six weeks.”

“Okay then. We’ll be ready.”

*

The lunar transport that Z constructed looked, to Perry, like a space yacht. It hovered over the two of them in the vast open space of the main ship.

“Beautiful,” Perry said, looking up. “I’m surprised you didn’t build one of these before. Just for you to cruise around in.”

“We did not design it with an eye toward aesthetics, Perry.”

“I know. It is handsome, though.”

It was silver and white, long and narrow, and pointed at both ends. The middle of its main hull rose higher than its ends, making it look to Perry something like a dolphin jumping out of water in an arc. On its underside, however, a long viewing gallery dropped down, its bottom nearly as low as the bow and stern. The passenger seats – the only seats, of course, since there was no crew – were on the floor of this gallery.

“You will be able to sit in that area, and look out,” Z said.

“Do you know what it looks like, roughly? The moon base, I mean?”

“It is just a small dome, on the surface. The size of your house. Most of it is tunnels. We will send a camera robot into the tunnels, while you’re there, and show you the feed.”

“Very good. And – will there be any bodies? Do you know what happened to the people there?”

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“There are none. They must have returned before the disaster here, or during it.”

“So, getting off the Earth didn’t end up helping the race, it turns out. How about on Mars? Was anyone stranded there?”

“Yes. There are corpses there.”

“Well. If I could get there, I could . . . show the kids a two-hundred-thousand-year-old dead human. I wonder what would be left of them. Just freeze-dried, must be. Yikes. It’s just as well.”

*

The day approached. Perry prepped the kids. Z told them that the trip would take six hours each way, and they could spend three hours around the moon base.

“So you’ll get to see something that humans made,” Perry said. “Other humans. I’m surprised I didn’t think of this earlier. When I was here the first time, getting to the Moon was very hard. They had to build a ship almost as long as Z’s ship, and it took three days to get there. Coming back and landing safely was very difficult, too. Only twelve people walked on the Moon, back before I went into that case. More went afterward. Anyway, I’m glad this occurred to me.”

“And it’s safe?” Jonathan asked. “I remember you saying that some astronauts were killed, back in your first life.”

“They were. But the zhranmin are much better at this than we ever were. Z wouldn’t send us there if there was any risk.”

Perry remembered how he was trying to raise them, and added:

“I mean, it’s up to you. If you – any of you – don’t want to go, you don’t have to. I thought you would like this, but you can stay here.”

All four of them said they wanted to go.

*

When the yacht was complete, Z lowered it down to the bottom of the large ship and had the five of them board. They stepped up into a tall hatch that opened on the back side of the dipping bow of the ship. The reflection and Perry showed the children the gallery, the seats, the seatbelts. Only then did Perry really realize that the very concept of being in a vehicle – much less a spaceship – was hitherto unknown to them. They had never stepped into a car, a boat, even a horse-drawn wagon. They were amazed by the white hallways, the padded seats, the floor-to-ceiling glass, even while the yacht was motionless on the ground.

“After some distance of flight, you will be weightless,” Z told them. “Perry has told you what gravity is. This ship will be going fast enough that you won’t feel it any longer, until we approach the Moon. You will float in the gallery, if you get out of your seats. And even on the surface of the Moon, the gravity will be less.”

*

When the day came, Z saw them off as they entered the yacht again from the floor of the ship.

“Are you coming?” Perry asked it. “Can you be projected inside the yacht when it’s outside this ship?”

“I cannot. I will be speaking, however.”

Once in their seats in the gallery, the yacht lifted straight up, into the void of the larger ship. Before it, a large exit then opened up, dilating open just as the smaller doorway below had done for Perry, eleven years before. The yacht pulled out. All of the movement was silent, and smooth.

They rose high into the sky, and started to cross the continent. Perry saw the green of what had been the eastern United States give way to the plains and then the Rocky Mountains, with the yacht rising all the while, and by the time they were over the Pacific they were dozens of miles, Perry guessed, over the surface. They felt no acceleration, but the ship must have been speeding up exponentially. Soon they could see the edge of the Earth, and after some time the entire globe was in their windows.

It was magical. Perry had asked the zhranmin fabricator to make them a globe, years before, but looking at that was nothing like being a hundred miles over the oceans and continents and seeing the actual Pacific, Himalayas, Mediterranean, all of it.

“All that room and no other people,” Elizabeth said.

“It’s astounding, isn’t it,” Perry answered her. All five of them kept staring down at the Earth even as they came closer to the Moon, and it became visible on the other side of the gallery.

“So, back in my first life people managed to do this only a few dozen times,” Perry told them. “They landed on the Moon six times. And there was also a space station, or a couple of them, that orbited the earth up here. They were small. No one could live off the Earth permanently. After I left, people must have gotten a little better at it, at least.”

Eventually they did get close enough to the Moon that its features became more visible, and they changed positions to see it. Except for William. Perry saw that he had sat down and clipped himself back into his seat. He hoped he wasn’t getting nauseated. The boy occupied himself with a sort of abacus cube he had made himself.

They approached and the Moon soon took up all of the view out the gallery; and then craters and their shadows grew nearer; and then the many different shades of whites and grays resolved themselves before them; and then they could pick out a dome that was their target.

A human-made dome. The first thing the children had ever seen, after eleven years, which was made by a person other than themselves or Perry.

It was modest. It was smaller than their house. It was colored just another gray in a landscape full of them. As they neared, Perry could see that it had indeed been punched through several times by meteors of varying sizes. One had been large enough to leave a foot-wide hole. Others had not broken through, but had left indentations. The dome looked very worn, but the children still stared at it entranced; even William, now.

The yacht settled down next to the dome, although Perry noticed that it still hovered rather than land on the surface.

“So, there it is, sure enough,” Perry said. “That was built after my first life. By our old brothers and sisters. Z says it’s an entrance to tunnels – that’s right, Z?”

“Yes. And there’s a greenhouse roof behind that rise, there, and then a solar array behind that. The majority of the construction here is underground, as we have said. Still, it is not a large complex. We will send in a camera. We were ready to force open the hatch, there, but that meteor hole is large enough.”

The five of them saw the hovering camera fly into view and then lower itself into the hole in the roof. To Perry, it looked uncannily like a regular old-school film camera.

A section of the viewing wall became opaque and displayed what the camera was seeing. They saw it float down an easy staircase, and then it was in a large room, empty but with doors lining the walls.

“What do you think is behind the doors?” Elizabeth said.

“Things like space suits, I would guess,” Perry answered. “And oxygen tanks, probably. Things anyone would need out on the surface.”

The camera progressed through underground rooms. They saw office chairs, and desks. There were several bathrooms. There was a dining room, and a kitchen.

“Mixing bowls. Just like ours,” Charlotte said.

Off the kitchen there was a storeroom. It had wire shelves lined with canisters.

“Can you get closer to those?” Perry asked. “I want to see if there are any labels.”

There were not. The canisters were intact – underground as they were, and subject to no oxidation, or solar radiation, or floods, fire, or anything else – but any labels had degraded into illegibility over the millennia.

There were bedrooms. There was a lounge, with couches and a large screen on the wall. There was an apparent control room with many video monitors stacked up; and thin rectangular boxes below –

“Are those – computers?” William said. “They look a bit like your writing machine.”

“They are.”

Then a hallway led to a doorway to a much larger room.

“This is the greenhouse,” Z said. “We will pull around over it, while the camera is in there.”

The ship lifted and then moved away from the dome, gliding about fifty yards. It stopped over a flat expanse of what looked like just more lunar surface.

“Covered with dust, after all these years,” Perry said. “Meteor strikes blew it around. And I see some holes here, too.”

Below them, the camera was moving down an aisle. It was flanked by tables of raised soil beds. They again looked as gray as the outside.

“Looks like moon dust covered up the dirt. I wonder if they were able to – create it up here, from the ground, or if they had to fly it up from Earth. It’s not going to grow anything now, at any rate.”

“Do you think they raised enough to feed themselves?” Elizabeth asked.

“I strongly doubt it. They would have needed more area. Fun to try, though. It was a start.”

On the other side of the greenhouse chamber the camera flew into a much larger room, which had bare rock walls. It contained several boring machines, giant things taller than Perry with rotating toothed grinding wheels.

“And they were still building out,” Perry said. “This was in progress. Imagine what they might have built here. When I was young, I read books that guessed that we would someday build cities, with people born and growing up here.”

“That is all, for this one,” Z said. “There is another one, also. Shall we visit it?”

The second moon base had much in common with the first, with some differences. It was also primarily underground, but it had several entrances. They were wedge-shaped, rather than domes, but again were severely worn from meteor impacts. There was one large dome in the complex, however, which reminded them all of the very viewing gallery they stood in.

“That must have been just a big room with a view, like this one here. I wonder if they gardened in it.” It, too, was covered with gray dust.

“We are not finding a suitable entrance for the camera,” Z’s voice told them. “I am afraid we will not be able to enter this one.”

“What are those ditches there?” Perry asked. He pointed across an expanse of surface. “On that incline. Can you move over to see those? And maybe rise higher?”

The yacht rose, and moved toward the feature. Once they were high enough, Perry recognized it. It was two large shapes, next to each other, cut into the rock.

“Those are the characters for the word ‘China,’ ” he said. “I remember them. So this was a Chinese base. I’ll bet the other was American, or European. Or both.”

“They couldn’t all build one together?” Charlotte asked.

“Apparently not,” Perry said. “Who knows, maybe both were Chinese. I don’t think there’s any way to tell, from what we saw. But this one definitely was.”

*

The children were quiet on the way back down to Earth, absorbed again in looking down at the oceans and land masses as they approached.

In the weeks and months to come, they seldom talked about their birthday field trip. The Moon seemed very far removed from their clearing and woods, and their effort to feed themselves and become as self-sustainable as possible.

But Perry was glad he had come up with the idea, and taken them there. He felt – validated, somehow. He had worried over the years that all his stories of his past, the planet’s past, might have seemed entirely invented, to them. Would they distrust him? He had never had the impression that they did, but still, he would not have blamed them if they had ever grown to doubt what might have seemed like endless tall tales from their elder. But now they had seen the vanished civilization he prattled on about endlessly; or as much of it as they possibly could have.