PART TWO — THE MENAGERIE · 2852 to 2855

Chapter Ten — As Bought

Before anyone in this part goes to work, the book owes the reader a walk around the property. Part One ended with a signature; the reader should not have to imagine what the signature bought, because imagination will get it wrong in both directions — too grand and too empty at once. Here is the moon as the buyers received it, in the plain terms of an inventory, which is fitting, because an inventory is the one document the sale never included.

Start with the size of the thing, because the size is the challenge. The moon has about as much dry land as the whole of the old world — all of Earth's continents, shorelines to mountains, and nobody on it. Of that, the part the consortium had actually finished — made air-sweet, watered, soiled, seeded — was a single coastal shelf on the eastern sea: two hundred kilometers of coast, forty deep. Shelf, here and everywhere the ground is meant, is the geographer's word — a broad step of land standing out of the sea — and this book, which already has one beloved shelf full of books, will keep the two apart the way the moon did: the stories live on the shelf; the people live on the coastal shelf. Call it eight hundred thousand hectares of world that worked, stitched to a planet's worth of world that did not, not yet, and would not for lifetimes. The buyers owned all of it. They could live on the coastal shelf.