by D. F. Lovett
They had to come out here and rescue them. But there was only one person to rescue, from the very beginning: my mother.
And you see, the rescue mission, it didn’t go the way it should have. Because the White didn’t just destroy the Andronicus. It stalked it, defended its prey against invaders. It switched into some kind of offensive mode. It held a ring around it.
And you haven’t seen it yet, the White, but it’s a horror to behold. A great white monstrosity. A looming horror. I don’t… You’ll see it, when you see it, and then you’ll know
My mother, she lived inside the crumpled ship. The radio destroyed, no communication with the outside, but she stayed alive.
She splinted her leg. Hobbled through the wreck.
Twenty-two dead people in a crumpled spaceship in a crater on the far side of the Moon, so far away from everything and everyone.
Years later, as she lay dying, that’s when she first told me about it. She lived, you know. She had to live, or I wouldn’t be here. Not that I was old enough to learn about it, when she did tell me.
I was eight, when she told me about it. About all of it.
Adam would come visit us. He would visit us to talk with her, he heard everything she said. But I said I understood it better, that I knew it better, because I lived there, in that home with her, in Dome E. We had a good life, a quiet life. She would talk about going back out there and killing it.
There is no evil like it, she would whisper.
She hid no truths, my mother.
There is no evil truer, no thing worse that walks.
But then she would change her mind and say that there were so many worse things, that nothing the White contained would ever match the evils of humanity.
She could never decide which it was. No child should have heard the things she said, but I remember those things because of the time I spent with her. Just us. She taught me to fly, too, taught me to pilot. There are rules against children that young flying, of course, but who is there to enforce such rules?
My mother, they knew her up here as a quiet hero. The stories of her never made their way to Earth. We made sure of that. She didn’t want them to be known, not by anyone. She didn’t want the Earthlings to know that she had eaten the bodies of the dead out there with her, waiting for her rescuers, waiting for someone to get past the White. She didn’t want them to know that she had failed as a pilot, had somehow allowed the entire crew but herself to die. She didn’t want them to know that she had made her unborn daughter a cannibal, as we sustained ourselves on the frozen corpses of those who died in the crash.
And what haunted her until her death was that the only reason they ever rescued her, the only reason they ever broke through, is because the White lost interest. It went somewhere else, crawled away to another dark corner of the Moon.
We have to kill it, Ishmael. This isn’t a game, and this isn’t something we can turn back on. We have a mission to accomplish out here.
Ten
“Where are we, really?”
The two of us turned to face the speaker of these words, the man who had just entered the room. It had been only Q and me, staring across the horizon, as she spoke and I listened.
Nikolai had entered the room. The handsome young crewmate, the one from whom I had caught a vibe of optimism. The talented cook, the young father, the mournful co-pilot.
“Don’t we know where we are?” I asked.
“We know where we are,” Q said, answering my question. She gave Nikolai a penetrating glare, across the room, as he slowly walked toward us. He picked up a small globe of the Moo from a table, holding it in his hands, a grim smile on his face.
“We know where they say we are,” he said, “if you believe the things people tell you. But I mean where are we, really? Are we in a soundstage somewhere in the desert of North America? Or a lab, deep underneath New Washington somewhere? Or maybe in a sub, in the ocean? How much of this is just in our minds? How much of it is theater?”
“I don’t understand,” I said, and I didn’t.
“Nikolai,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”
“You think we’re on the Moon?” He continued toward us, about ten feet away now. As he inched closer I could see his eyes. Had they always been so bloodshot, so tired, so drained, or was this something new?
“Do you think we’re not on the Moon, Nikolai?” Q stared back at him.
He continued:
“A place humans have never been to? Doesn’t it seem a little strange to you, the idea that Adam Moonborn was born on the Moon one hundred years after humans first supposedly landed on it? It took that long for any real colonizing? You know that, according to their official story, man didn’t set foot on the Moon even once between 1972 and 2032? That’s sixty years of nothing, no one. Then suddenly we start trying to colonize the place? Doesn’t it all just seem a little too convenient to you? And now what we’re on an adventure to kill all the robots?”
“If we’re not doing that, what are we doing?”
“We’re imagining this shit. You and I are being fucked with. Unless you’re one of them. Q, I think you’re one of them, aren’t you? Ishmael, I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You say you’re from Earth, so does that mean you’re part of the plot or does that mean you’re a victim? Or maybe you’re both. Lots of people are both, you know.”
I could see him not in his entirety. His pale and haunted face, his unkempt hair. Sleepless would be the first word. Sleepless and exhausted and wired and gaunt. Troubled. Haunted. Paranoia, suspicion, fear.
A person becoming unhinged.
“I’m not either,” I said. “I flew to the Moon on a spaceship, from Earth. Wouldn’t I know if they were just flying me to a soundstage in the desert?”
“Not if none of this is real,” he said. “And it’s not like it brings me happiness. You think I like believing that my entire life is a dream? Or a lie?”
“What are you going to do?” Q asked.
“I saw you and Starboy and Moonborn and the woman from Earth and your whispers. I know you’re all plotting. Don’t you lie to me.” But he smiled at the two of us as he spoke, looking between us, then out the window behind us that gave us our view of the lunar surface.
We could overpower him. Only the briefest internal calculation told me this. Sure, he was strong, with an athletic build, but his incoherency had drained him of something. Even in this desperate disoriented state of his, we could still overpower him.
How long had he been this way? When you haven’t known someone for very long, it’s easy to mistake their disintegration for their regular state.
Or perhaps this was his regular state. Perhaps he had never believed that his home was his home. Perhaps he had consumed conspiracy theories and believed them for his entire life, bringing a family into a world he believed false.
“What are you going to do?” Q repeated.
“I’m deciding that,” he said, his eyes still darting over us. “But I know one thing. I’m not going to die for a lie or a dream.”
And with that, he turned around and walked toward the door, not looking back as we watched him go.
“I need to tell Adam and Starboy,” Q said, once he had left. “This is not good.”
She left too, and I was alone in the observation room, staring into the darkness, looking for any hints of the monsters we chased.
Eleven
We were making good speed across the lunar surface now, our broken crew, silent and scattered throughout the ship. My last conversation with Nikolai haunted me. My conversation with Q haunted me. The ghosts that haunted the surface of the Moon haunted me, both the mechanical animals we hunted and the lingering whispers of the dead.
An hour or two passed. Maybe longer. The observation rooms had no clocks in them, and I carried no time-telling device by this point in the trip.
And then, a ship on the horizon. We had seen no ships until this point, I’ll remind you. Just the lonely man in
his tower and the monstrous bots that crawled and flew across the surface.
I knew the style of this craft, had seen photos of such ships. It had been designed to look like a vessel of yore, the kind children know as pirate ships, the kind that the villain Colombo once used to conquer and enslave the innocent Americans of centuries ago. It was pageantry, of course, pure pageantry. The sails served no purpose, an anachronistic nod to the past, billowing falsehoods above the faux wooden spaceship that trudged below the sails.
Bad news, some voice in me whispered. She brings bad news.
Q and Starboy went out to meet it, carrying a message from Moonborn inviting its captain back to the Ozymandias.
This was the Chronos, Moonborn explained to Jennifer Curtis and me as we watched them from the Captain’s Roost. They returned with a vessel trailing, an imitation of a small watercraft.
We moved down to the library as the approaching spaceship disappeared from our view, beneath the Ozymandias.
No one mentioned Nikolai’s absence, but Moonborn pressed something into my hand.
I looked down to see a gun, small and silver. I had never held a gun before. Who has, these days?
“What is this?”
“It’s not lethal,” he said. “Just a stunner. Seizures only. If things escalate.”
Seven of us sat in the library: the five crewmates of the Ozymandias, minus Nikolai, and the two guests from the Chronos. The stranger captain introduced herself as Captain Rachel Gardener. Her first mate remained silent and entirely unnamed.
“You are out here seeking terrible things,” Moonborn said. “I know of your racket. I know what the Chronos does.”
“We sought adventure,” Gardener answered. “The same as you.”
“You sought it?” Moonborn asked. “You seek it no longer?”
“We found a tragedy,” Gardener said.
“That’s convenient.”
“I’m serious, Moonborn,” she said. “Two children, lost.”
Moonborn’s face dropped at this. A quick transition, a cloud passing over, the comprehension of a loss echoing his own.
“Lost?”
“They weren’t our own,” she said. “We met some scrappers, a rough couple living far out here, on the edges. Real walkers of the rim. These people…”
“Aren’t they the kinds you like? The better to laugh at?” His disdain had returned.
“They’re adrift somewhere, Moonborn. Or they’re dead. Your foe, it disrupted their camp. Chased everyone. The kids took off in an MUV and they’re still out there somewhere. In some tunnels, the family thinks.”
“Where is this camp?”
“The tunnels off Crisum, near your abandoned dome.”
“The camp was in the tunnels?”
“They had something figured out. We found them at the surface. The White had broken through, destroyed the tunnels.”
“I know this place,” he said.
“I know you do,” she said.
“My family. They died at the abandoned dome. It would’ve been the eighth dome.”
“We all know your story, Moonborn,” she said.
“Of course you know it, of all people,” he said. And then he turned to the rest of us, who sat behind him. He made eye contact with each of us individually, Starboy and Q and Jennifer Curtis and me.
“Your hate wounds you,” she said,
“She gives tours of where they died,” he said, his eyes still flickering between each of ours, ignoring her. “She tours them across this whole side, always here during the Far and Dark, always parading them around, pointing out the ghosts and their bones. How many deaths do you discuss, Gardener?”
“Forty,” she answered. “But I do not make new deaths. Can the same be said of you? Those four behind you. Did you not bring them out here to die? And where is the rest of your crew? Preceding you in death? You act all smug and heroic, Moonborn, but you are the danger. You are the enemy. You are their foe. Those scrappers in the tunnel camp, the ones whose children were chased and probably killed, the ones we saw crying, the ones we comforted and gave refuge on our ship. They’re back there now, their homes destroyed. You know what they said? You know why they say the attack happened? It wasn’t because the White is evil. The White has left them be for a generation. The White was there first and they respected it, gave it its due, gave it distance and dignity. The White hasn’t killed in years. So why is it killing now? Because of you, Adam Moonborn. Because it knows you are coming to fight it. Those children? Their blood is on your hands.”
Twelve
The missing person, in all of this: Nikolai the Lunatic. Something had driven him to some madness, some driving belief that none of what he saw could be taken as the truth.
But again and again, I return to this question of truth. What is the truth? Who is to say? Who could ever confirm a singular truth, a simple idea, one pervading essence through it all?
Picture him there. Picture Nikolai, on the gently rocking ship. In his own cabin, isolated, pacing, his walls holding him. He knows only one certainty: that the Moon is not where he is, because man has never been to the Moon. That Armstrong and Aldrin never walked this surface. That he, Nikolai, never walked it. He is somewhere far away.
And who is it who decides how mad Nikolai is? Is it me, the man with a name forged in fiction? Is it Moonborn, a child of pomp and celebrity? Is it you, the reader, whomever you may be? Is it the dead of the Moon?
I would take it back, of course. The gunshot. I would take it back.
I’d been jumpy, listening to Moonborn argue with Gardener. My right hand in my pocket. The small silver gun, in my hand. When Nikolai burst in, a gun in his own hand, what was I to do?
This moment, handed to me.
The madman, wild and wielding his own gun. Hair awry, eyes burning with some discovered danger. Nikolai, who had cooked us a meal when we first boarded this spaceship, turned into some kind of rabid beast in this desperate other world. Convinced his own world signified nothing. Convinced everything he knew was nothing but a vast conspiracy, for fools and by fools.
I fired my gun, standing as I did so.
I missed.
But Starboy didn’t.
When the Chronos receded into the darkness, away from the Ozymandias, they carried the stunned and comatose Nikolai, another castaway, another man overboard tossed to the currents.
He sought his own truths, and they brought him to his own end.
His loss was hardly noted. Only five of us remained.
Discussion Questions on the Text Thus Far
1. Can there be infinite truths?
2. Where does the truth go, when no one looks at it? Is the truth a cut on the bottom of your foot? Is it something that no one has ever known but everyone knows exists? Is it a child drowned in a river or left in the desert? Is it a siren, calling sailors to the rocks? Is it the half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of Herod’s murdered innocents, or is it the cries of their parents, or is it the grief of Herod himself, realizing what he had done?
3. Can there be infinite truths?
Canto Eight: The White
One
You know what the White means. What it represents, to Moonborn and to the Ozymandias and to the Moon and to us, his lost and ill-fated crew. The metaphors are thick, present, heavy-handed and apologetic.
We have told of the dangers it contained while never telling you what it was.
But you may wonder, what did it look like? What was it, when we finally saw it? Where and when did that beast appear before us and was it what we expected? Did they ever tell us what to expect, what the confrontation with this ineffable brute would consist of? Did Moonborn ever tell us how he meant to kill it?
I had started to imagine that it would be a whale, like the one in the book he gave me. Some massive fish swimming in the empty lunar oceans.
Or perhaps yet another flying saucer, the biggest one yet, dwarfing and consuming the Ozymandias.
Or maybe a slug, o
r an elephant, or a tiger, or another star burning bright.
What the White was has been hinted at; what it truly was, what it looked like, was this:
The Moon.
When I spotted it—and yes, it was me who spotted it, there on the horizon, in the distance—that was what it was. Another moon, luminous and monstrous and white, a demon waiting over the edge.
Two
I read a book, years ago, about a young man who died in the woods. He didn’t get lost. He went out there to live, but then to die. The book made me cry. It made everyone who read it cry.
But the strangest thing in that book was that the author of it interrupted the book to tell a tale of his own life, of something he had done once. The author told a story of when he climbed a mountain and almost died, or something to that effect. It felt jarring, out of place, unwelcome and unnecessary. The chapter about the author and his mountain felt like an irritating guest, invited but annoying, telling his own stories every chance he got. Not realizing that the guest of honor had lived a thousand more lives than he could ever live.
I tell you this, now, because I am about to do the same.
This book you read is the tale of the Moon, of the Ozymandias, of the Moonborn, and of the White. But at times it also has to be the tale of Ishmael, the bemused traveler who, in some dark and dreary November of his soul, made the mistake of boarding a spaceship to the Moon.
This is the story of the mountain I climbed, years earlier.
I went to the World Bowl to document it, for a class I took. World Bowl One. I’ve mentioned this one already, this event, for it’s the event that sent Jennifer Curtis to her fame, with the micro-narratives she wrote of it.