Space

The Japanese are in space, the US has turned inward - flights into space have become dreams of old men and women, dreams of an age of sublimated warfare which have left behind only images of charmingly antique rocket craft.

Malenfant in this universe is not the reckless adventurer of TIME. He has stayed on Earth to invest in research into what he regards as long-term thinking: SETI, using gravitational lensing to hunt for planets and Eetie signals, exploring the venerable Fermi paradox, 'If they existed, they would be here'. When Nemoto, a Japanese researcher on the Moon, discovers evidence of the activity of extraterrestrial intelligences in the solar system, she is unable to reconcile her observations with the accepted paradigm.

Instead of publishing her findings, she seeks Malenfant's opinion: he travels to the Moon, ostensibly to lecture on SETI, in fact to answer Nemoto's question: WHY NOW? Nemoto and Malenfant share the certainty that the resources of all nations on Earth are needed to respond to this, and this was her reason for summoning Malenfant. But deeper layers of Fermi's paradox unravel against a backdrop of violently mixed reactions to the revelation that alien beings, dubbed the Gaijin, also inhabit the solar system. It's like the Gaijin are e-mailing themselves from star to star, and are not really there at all - though others might be.

In this confusion Malenfant disappears in space and Nemoto becomes a recluse in a Lunar cave - both are hatching plans to confront a threat only they can bring themselves to fully believe in...