The Beautiful Side of the Moon

by Leye Adenle

  And thus began my long, drawn out flashback of a life that had been as unremarkable as it had been under- whelming until a few days ago when magic came to seek me.

  As the oxygen depleted, my mind faded and I could no longer attach names to the faces being served up in my memory. A woman I had thought was my nanny became just another person with hazy features floundering in a region of my brain where images flattened like two- dimensional pictures and floated away from me as I sailed headfirst towards a light that kept getting brighter.

  My body rose gently into the light. I wasn’t breathing but I wasn’t suffocating. I knew I was dead, or close to death. Titus Titus bent over me and held my hand. He pulled me up out of my spacesuit and we floated together up into a viewing chamber; a large dome the size of a little house. In the gigantic ship we flew over the empty redness of Mars. We sailed along with the rocky rings of Saturn.

  We flew far out until the entire mass of our solar system was framed within our dome. We travelled through galaxies. I witnessed the magnificence of a black hole. I watched two suns orbiting one another. We went beyond the stars and I saw things that the human mind cannot comprehend and human words cannot describe.

  We dropped into the orbit of a moonless planet. It was yellow and pink, and its weather was green. We left that world for another not far away, where we hovered above trees whose roots clung to the flowing gas that was the ground, and whose black crystal leaves moved and morphed with a current of energy that blew their diamond seeds around. We approached twin planets revolving around each other in a galactic tango. We flew close to the one whose surface was like Earth’s, with firm ground and flora growing from it. Beings like dinosaurs inhabited the grassy valleys, humanoids with clubs and leaves to cover their bodies waved their weapons and threw stones at us. We flew to the opposite world, visible from the first as a large blue moon. Our ship cruised above the skyscrapers there, and the people, much like us, waved from the windows of their flying crafts that sailed just a little way below ours.

  We left the two worlds and sailed through their sun. The white, flowing plasma washed over our ship like liquid marble.

  We flew past countless galaxies and the worlds within them, and we came to a place that was black and empty, and the blackness pulsated. We witnessed the birth of a star. We watched the death of a world.

  We travelled even further out. The dark void we sailed into became a blue sky. We sailed on and the blue changed to purple and then to green. We sailed further and the dome above us was as woven fabric, with fibres as large as my arm. We sailed further and the sky was cloth. We sailed even further and the cloth was white with blue stripes. We sailed even further and the white and blue stripes became a bib around an infant’s neck. The child was red. Its features were like ours, but blue flame clung to his head where we had hair. My heart staggered at the thought of the size of this alien infant being, if we had come from galaxies within galaxies within an atom within a fibre of its bib.

  Titus Titus looked at me. He was neither smiling nor glowering. I had seen what he wanted me to see and that was enough for him and for me. I understood why he had brought me there.

  Chapter 49 To Die Breathing

  ‘Six hundred and sixty seven, six hundred and sixty eight...’ The female voice of my suit continued counting.

  I opened my eyes. I was being carried. I blinked to clear my failing sight. My legs were in the clutches of hooded people in long black cloaks each side of me. Two more held my hands. Ahead, another two walked, their long cloaks softly billowing in the stillness of the moon.

  I closed my eyes and let the voice of my suit carry me away.

  I gasped as I awoke. I sat up and gulped deep breaths. Hands held me back from sitting up. I was captive, but I was alive. I was breathing again and I wasn’t in the suit. I was naked. My bare skin was on a hard, elevated surface. The mist cleared from my eyes and I looked round me. The hooded people who had carried me from the crater held up glowing rocks whose green luminescence was all the light there was.

  I continued filling my lungs with gulp after gulp of air

  almost running out of oxygen had made me greedy for the stuff. I seemed to be in a cave but I couldn’t see how high it was, or how wide. There were at least one hundred hooded people around me, their bodies hidden beneath their sackcloths. They were all looking at me. The banished magicians my mother talked about. Any time now their leader would come to claim the prize that he had hauled in. Perhaps he was already there, snarling at me beneath one of the black hoods.

  At my feet, one of them raised a hand from within the depths of their black cloak and drew away their hood. In the glow of the green light I saw that it was a woman. Her thinning hair was white or blonde, and it reflected the green light. Her cheekbones were pronounced under her stretched pale skin. She was starving or sick, and her bulging eyes looked sad.

  ‘Are you Mr Magic?’ she said.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked as I sat up.

  ‘My name is Galigangangah. You should know. You should know who I am. You are Mr Magic. You are, aren’t you?’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Have you come to save us?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Titus Titus. Where am I?’

  ‘You don’t know where you are?’

  Of course I knew. I was on the moon. But when I woke up and I wasn’t dead, and I knew that the place I was in was not a kind of afterlife, I expected to be the prisoner of the magicians on the moon. Instead I had been rescued by prisoners who expected me to rescue them. And they knew my name. Or at least, Mr Magic’s name.

  ‘Galigangah,’ I said.

  ‘Galigangangah.’

  ‘Galigangangah, I was almost dead in a crater before you rescued me.’

  ‘You cannot die.’

  ‘I assure you, I was dying. I was almost dead.’

  ‘No. You have been on the surface for one hundred days without oxygen and you are still alive. Nobody who is human can survive that long.’

  ‘I was only there for forty days.’

  ‘No. You were there for one hundred days. Itohan told us where to find you.’

  ‘Itohan? My mother?’

  ‘We don’t know who she is. She brings us medicine.

  She told us you had come to the moon.’

  ‘Galigangangah, I want to answer all your questions, but first you must answer mine. Who are you and where am I?’

  Galigangangah spoke to the rest of them. ‘He is tired. He needs to rest.’

  She repeated, I assumed, the same thing in ten differ- ent languages that I counted by the number of sentences. I had never heard any of them but different sections of the crowd responded with ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’, a universal sound of understanding.

  She said something else that was shorter that she didn’t first say in English. Murmuring spread through the cave.

  Galigangangah looked at me. ‘You need to rest. When you feel better, you will tell us what to do.’

  ‘Were you also in the crater? Did you bring me here? No. They did.’

  Galigangangah pointed at the people by my sides. The cloaks fell off their bodies, three of them on either side of me. They were not human. They were a reddish brown. Their skin looked like the texture of an elephant’s, even though their bodies looked more like snakes. Their heads were tapered at the end of long necks like a dinosaur. At the end of the neck, which was half their height, the rest of their bodies split into two equal parts, each the same size as their neck. Their ‘legs’ rested on the floor at right angles and continued on the ground as if they were large mutant pythons raised on their bellies. They were like upside down Ys curved at the tips. Strange as the otherworldly beings’ appearance was, however, I was not afraid, and indeed they ought to have been frightful to any human. But only recently I had travelled galaxies upon galaxies and marvelled at the indescribable beings that populate the planets therein, even the gigantic planets construct- ed from scrat
ch by the strange beings who created such artificial planets to live upon. Dream though it was, I had seen it all.

  Chapter 50 Strange Letter G

  My hallucinations, as I lay dying on the moon, had taught me something about myself that I would never have known had my brain cells not reached the terminal frenzied firings of the final stages before death. Who I was, or who people thought I was, was nothing. It was infinitesimally insignificant. Whatever I did or did not do meant nothing. Could I save these people? It did not matter. Was I still on the moon? That didn’t matter either. Would they ever be saved? That, also, meant nothing. They wanted Mr Magic. I would be who they wanted me to be. It meant nothing either way.

  ‘I do not need to rest,’ I said. ‘How many of you are here?’

  ‘We don’t know. There are others who have escaped.’

  ‘Are we on the beautiful side of the moon?’

  ‘Yes. Underneath their city.’

  ‘They brought you here?’

  ‘They brought all of us here.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since I was eighteen. I was taken from a play. I was alone backstage waiting to come on. My parents were in the audience. I have been here for twelve years.’

  She used to be an actress.

  Another woman took her hood off. She was black. Her grey dreadlocks extended to the ground. ‘They took me on my wedding day,’ she said.

  All around, they uncovered their heads, or shed their cloaks. There were so many different beings.

  ‘I was playing hide and seek with my twin sister,’ another human said. ‘I hid in a cupboard under the stairs. They took me from there. I was sleeping when they took me.’

  ‘I was in the bathtub.’

  ‘I was driving to the hospital in a blizzard. I gave birth to her in the car. They took both of us.’

  ‘I was robbing a bank with my girlfriend. I went into the safe. They took me from there.’

  ‘I was saying confession when they took me.’

  ‘My brother told me to come and see a light outside the house. They took me then.’

  ‘My father was pushing me on a swing. I fell into a well.’

  ‘I had just climbed into my neighbour’s tree house. I was praying.’

  They took turns telling me how they had been stolen from their lives. It seemed important to them to tell me, so I listened.

  There was not one male amongst the different beings.

  I did not ask why. They expected me to know.

  ‘What about them?’ I asked about the reptile beings.

  ‘We don’t know where they are from,’ Galigangangah said, ‘but they were also taken.’

  ‘Do they talk?’

  ‘No. But they draw and they write. And they can understand us.’

  One of them lowered her head to me. Her eyelids blinked over a completely black eye. She motioned with her head for me to follow. She turned and began to move as if walking, one ‘leg’ going before the other, only the ‘legs’ didn’t actually lift from the ground. The others made way for her. I lowered my feet to the ground. They sank into soft sand. I followed the being to the end of the cave. The rock face was covered in drawings and symbols scratched onto it. She turned her head to me, then swivelled it around to point at an image.

  Scratched onto the rock was a triangle with its right side bent into itself like the letter G. It meant nothing to me.

  ‘We have not been able to decipher their language but we know they were here before us. Those had been written before we got here,’ Galigangangah said.

  Another of the beings walked up to the wall. Looking at me, she raised the end of one of her legs and drew beneath the image using a small rock.

  She looked at me all the time, drawing with her back to the rock face she drew upon. Above the symbol, she drew a saucer. She drew two parallel lines coming out of the saucer and ending on either sides of the triangle. She moved her writing rock to lines of tiny symbols that had been etched onto the rock. I moved closer to see. She pointed the rock at a particular symbol. It was the strange G. She pointed to another line and there again was the rectangular G.

  All through the lines, in several places, the strange G appeared and I understood. The symbols were not letters, they were words. Their language had a symbol for every word and I was the rectangular G. I was their Mr Magic as well.

  Chapter 51 Space Robot

  I turned to the people, the humans and the others. They were every age. They were all thin and they all wore an expression of hopelessness on their faces, even as they looked at the one they had all hoped for.

  ‘Why didn’t Itohan save you?’ I asked Galigangangah. ‘If they find out she comes here, and she takes any one of us, they will take a hundred more for the one she

  rescues. She told us you will save all of us.’ ‘You said you escaped. How?’

  ‘There are tunnels. Others before us dug them. Every time they discover a tunnel, they fill it up. We dig new ones all the time so others can escape.’

  ‘What do they do to you?’

  ‘Nothing. They return some, the rest they keep. They examine us. They take samples from us. They inject things into us. They give us coins and they take them back. When they are done, they leave us.’

  ‘Coins? What do they want you to do with the coins?’

  ‘Nothing. They just watch us.’

  ‘Where exactly do they keep you?’

  ‘Nowhere. They just leave us.’

  ‘They just leave you to wander about?’

  ‘They just leave us. We gather together and when we find the tunnels we escape.’

  I looked at them. They were all looking at me. I knew why they had been taken.

  ‘Listen, everyone. They took you because they are afraid of you.

  ‘You are as powerful as they are. You can do everything they can do. Even if you don’t know it, they do. They kept you because they are afraid to harm you. They know that the instant they try, you will react with the power that is in your instinct.

  ‘I have come to save you. I know you expected something else. An army with weapons, perhaps. But I have my army here. You are my army and we are our own weapons. We will return to the surface and you will return to your homes in their ships. We will defeat them, but you must believe you can. You are like them.’

  Galigangangah finished interpreting my words and they all stood silently looking at me.

  Galigangangah spoke to me. ‘What do you mean when you say we are like them?’

  ‘You are like them. I am like them. We are all like them.’

  ‘The robots?’

  ‘Robots?’

  ‘Yes. Robots. They are all robots.’

  Chapter 52 Doubting Women

  When in doubt, don’t show it. My line manager used to say so.

  Robots on the moon made more sense than a colony of magicians in lunar exile, but Titus Titus was no robot and neither were his goons, at least not the ones I met and dealt with back on Earth. But these women had been kidnapped by robots, and as far as they knew, only the robots lived on the so-called beautiful side of the moon. Robots and magic and flying saucers and aliens simply didn’t seem to belong together. Robots, especially, threw me. But if I was in doubt, I’d better not show it.

  ‘Is your name Mr Magic or not?’ Galigangangah asked.

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. That is my name. Mr Magic. And I have come to take you all back to your homes.’

  ‘Do you know what the robots want from us? Why they took us?’

  I could not look her in the eye and lie. It would also have made it worse if I started talking about magic and tattoos that turned to dragons and Titus Titus and the Great Schism.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I waited for dismay.

  ‘Do you work for the space alliance?’

  ‘The space alliance?’

  ‘Yes. The space alliance. Itohan works for the space alliance.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. The space alliance. Yes. I work
for them. I mean, I’m from the space alliance. Yes. I’m Mr Magic of the space alliance. That’s me.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I told you. Mr Magic. Of the space alliance. And I’ve come to...’

  ‘To take us all back to our homes. Yes, we’ve heard you say so. How are you going to get us back home if you didn’t know about the robots and if you don’t have a ship.’

  ‘We will use their ships.’

  ‘How many ships do they have?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you fly their ships?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Do you know where they keep them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever been to the moon before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How exactly are you going to save us?’

  ‘I don’t know, Galigangangah. I really don’t know. But I know I can save you. This was my mother’s plan all along. I am meant to be here. I am meant to save you. This is why she left me on the moon. To save you. You have to trust me.’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’

  ‘Because I am Mr Magic and Itohan told you I would rescue you.’

  ‘Maybe you’re not the one. How did you get to the moon? Where is your ship?’

  ‘My ship? I did not need one.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘It’s not how I got here that matters. What matters is that I am here now. I have to get to the surface and I need someone to show me the way. Who can take me to the surface?’

  She stared at me.

  ‘Who can take me to the surface?’

  Her silence pulsated with anger and despair. She turned to the rest, and with a raised voice she said: ‘He wants to know who can take him to the surface?’ Then she repeated it in the different languages and when she was done she faced me and the silence in the cave was unnerving. I knew that they knew that there was some- thing wrong. They sensed that I wasn’t the saviour they’d expected, that I was not going to save them. It was a real possibility that at any time they could turn on me and return me to the crater from which they’d rescued me.