Ride the Moon: An Anthology (26 page)

A kiss of love, that was how he'd given Adelia his soul. Because, in love, one shared more than one's body.

What if Adelia gave him her soul in return? What if he broke the deal and they both lived–carrying each other's soul, side by side?

A roar tore through the air and the ground rippled like a great wave. The flask shook in his hand, spilling seawater to the ground. The mermaid's displeasure echoed in his bones.
A good sign.

“Adelia.” He had to trust himself or all would be lost. “Please listen. I gave you my soul. It's yours to keep forever. Will you now give me yours? I promise to cherish it and keep it as my own.”

She nodded, her eyes wide. “Is this a pledge? I waited so long for you to say it.” She smiled, and he saw something of his own fear and sadness in the tilt of her lips. A mirror of himself. “Take it. It's yours.”

Had she understood he really meant it? He shook his head. No need to fear. He really couldn't take it by force–if she loved him, she'd offer it freely.

And in the end that was the only thing that mattered.

So he kissed her.

The flask fell from his hand and shattered.

The hopcar soared over the crater wall and settled to the rock-strewn floor just a few meters away. Its bright-green metalwork, only slightly dulled by the dust its landing had raised, gleamed in the Earthshine.

Years of trudging across the crater floor from my habidome to the shrine had turned my own moonsuit the colour of old bones. Recently, my skin had begun to take on that same skeletal gray, as though, like the legendary chameleon of old Earth, I was beginning to blend in with my surroundings. Nevertheless, with both gloved hands I brushed away the fresh layer of dust the hopcar's arrival had deposited, wanting to look my best for my visitor.

After all, it had been most of a decade since the last one.

The dust settled, and the hopcar's airlock slid open, revealing my visitor, her own moonsuit so spotlessly white that it glowed almost as bright as the smooth pearl-white globe of the Earth, hanging above us.

“Welcome, Ms. Chai,” I said into my helmet microphone. “I am Brother Damon.”

“Then you really do exist,” a woman's voice came back in my ears. “I admit I half-expected I'd get out here and find the whole thing was an elaborate joke by my friends.”

I didn't know how to respond to that; I didn't know what she meant, then. Instead I said, “If you'll follow me, Ms. Chai, I'll show you to the shrine.”

“Lead on, Brother Damon. And call me Tia, please.”

“Very well, Tia.” I waited until she joined me, then led her across the crater floor toward the shadowed wall where the shrine is buried.

“I don't see anything,” Tia said.

“Wait until we step into shadow,” I said, which we did a moment later. “Now turn off your lamp and wait for your eyes to adjust.”

Her lamp went out; I had never turned mine on. We waited in silence for one minute, two; then, “Oh!” she said.

From the darkness ahead of us emerged the ghostly image of a door, a simple, arched doorway outlined in faint, glowing silver. Words in a thousand ancient languages and alphabets surrounded it on all sides, always the same words, whatever the language, whatever the script. “Je me souviens.” “I remember.” “Ich mich erinnern.” “Recuerdo.” A faint path outlined in the same luminescent silver wound through tumbled rocks to the door.

“Now we will go in,” I said.

The door swung outward at our approach, and closed behind us. We stood in a chamber walled and floored in smooth, black rock. Overhead, a single glowring, set in a golden sunburst, struck sparks of fiery light from thousands of tiny crystals embedded in the rock. For the short time we stood there, as the pumps filled the chamber with air, we might have been floating in space, surrounded by stars.

“Cool,” said Tia.

The glowring changed colour from silver-white to a golden-yellow, and I removed my helmet. Tia followed suit, and shook out long black hair that proved to me she seldom visited airless worlds; those who often wear vacuum suits keep their hair cropped short, as I did, when I still had hair.

She smiled at me, dark eyes flashing in a heart-shaped, almond-coloured face. She was younger than I had anticipated; but then, perhaps I was older than she had anticipated, for the first thing she said was, “How long have you been here?”

“I have kept this shrine for almost fifty standard years,” I said, aware, as I had not really been in a long time, of my own balding pate and lined face, thinning now toward gauntness. A part of my mind chided me for my vanity, while another part, forever young and foolish, lamented the fact this dark-haired beauty would never find me attractive. Until a few weeks ago, the chastity drugs silenced that part, but the medirobot stopped providing those drugs after my last physical examination.

I stepped forward and lightly touched the inner door, and it opened, admitting us into the shrine itself.

We might have been in one of the ancient churches of Earth, familiar to me from the archives of the Order. Carved from billion-year-old moonstone, the shrine is a long, high-ceilinged vault. Pillars march down both sides, carved in the shapes of trees, their branches blending smoothly into the gothic ribs of the ceiling and twining across the walls in a profusion of stony leaves and twigs. Set among the branches, like strange fruit, are globes of red crystal, each containing an oil lamp. Their soft light spills like fresh blood across the polished floor, offering the only illumination apart from the silvery glow of the nave.

There stands a great basalt sphere, ten times the height of a man, the oceans and landmasses of old Earth molded in high relief upon it. Billions of photon emitters prick the surface, individually too tiny to be seen, one for each human being still living on the Earth when the great asteroid slammed into the North Atlantic, cracking the crust like an eggshell, boiling away the oceans, shrouding the dying world in steam and gas.

The light is siphoned down from the moon's surface through fiber-optic threads. As the featureless white Earth waxes and wanes, a translucent, sourceless glow likewise waxes and wanes across the basalt globe.

I waited for Tia's reaction. The last pilgrim, all those years ago, wept. Even though I visit the shrine every day, changing the oil in the lamps, sweeping the already spotless floor, polishing the globe, reciting the prayers that have been said every day in this place for most of three centuries, I occasionally find tears in my eyes, too.

After a long moment, Tia spoke. “I can't believe this is still here.” Her voice was too loud for that silent place, yet she raised it even louder, as though trying to raise an echo.

There are no echoes in the shrine; reverberation suppressors built into the pillars ensure it.

“Where would it go?” I said.

“I guess what I really mean is, I can't believe
you're
here.” She looked around. “For fifty years, you've been tending this place? For what?”

“For the Order.”

“What's that?”

“Let's sit down. Even lunar gravity, I find, wears at a man my age.” I was feeling every one of my years at that moment. I slid into a pew, and she slid in beside me. For a moment, I looked at the globe.

“Three hundred years ago,” I said, my voice hoarse—except for the daily prayers, I spoke so little—”the Earth was destroyed. Yet, by the grace of God, humanity survived. Here on the moon, on Mars, elsewhere in the solar system. Barely self-sufficient, the colonies struggled. Some failed. Many more people died. But humanity survived. And since then, we have conquered the stars themselves. Now there are a hundred worlds, where before there was only one.”

“By the grace of God?” Tia gestured at the globe. “Eight
billion
dead. Where is God in such a calamity?”

“Had the asteroid hit a century before, when there were no self-sufficient colonies, humanity would have been destroyed,” I said. “God gave us the time we needed to develop the technology we needed to survive...just as He gave Noah time to build the Ark.”

“Even if that's true, why this shrine? What purpose does it serve?”

“If we are to remember the grace of God, we must remember the catastrophe from which we were spared—and the billions who were not,” I said. “In the years after the destruction of Earth, my Order was formed, an Order dedicated to serving God in remembrance and honour of all those who served God on Earth in all the myriad religions humanity's God-given sense of the divine had spawned. With the support of all the colonies of the Solar System, we built this shrine, and we have kept it ever since, saying daily prayers for humanity's dead. Humanity's leaders came here to dedicate it. People from all over the solar system made pilgrimages to it. It inspired poetry and artwork and literature and music for decades. It inspired humanity itself, inspired it to a rebirth and rededication; focused its efforts on surviving and prospering.”

“But...surely that would have happened anyway.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” I looked at the globe. The Earth was near full and all the globe's landmasses glowed with light. “This place reminds us of where we came from, and all those for whom our ancestral home became a grave. For the Order, it became a sacred trust. And though we serve God in many other ways throughout the Hundred Worlds, we have always kept a brother or sister here, to keep the shrine and greet the pilgrims who visit it.”

Tia bit her lip for a moment, then burst out, “But...nobody really cares any more, do they?”

“You do. You cared enough to make the journey here from...wherever you are from.”

“Oskana,” she said. She must have seen my incomprehension, for she added, “Alpha Centauri IV.”

“An unusual name.”

She shrugged. “I'm told it's a word from an ancient Earth language meaning ‘the place where the bones are piled.' Oskana only has plant life now, but giant animals lived there millions of years ago. You can hardly take a step without tripping over a fossil.”

“The place where the bones are piled.” I nodded at the globe. “It would be a fitting name for Earth.”

“I didn't come because I care,” she said then. “I came on a bet.”

I stared at her.

“A friend bet me this place was real; he'd read about it in some old history. I bet it was a myth. I was coming to Luna on business, so I decided to see for myself. And here I am.”

My stomach churned; my heart fluttered. How could this holy shrine, meant to last forever, have become a myth in less than thirty decades?

I looked back at the globe to give myself time to gather my wits. Perhaps she felt that way before she came, I thought. But I could not believe that anyone could fail to be moved by the shrine. “And now that you have seen it?” I ventured at last.

She stared at it a long moment more. “It's smaller than I imagined.” She stood, smiling at me. “Thanks for the tour. I have to catch a ship, so I'd better be going.”

I wanted to shout at her, argue with her, cajole her...but we have strict rules against proselytizing; those who come to us must come of their own free will. I could answer questions, as I had, but that was all my vows would allow.

Silent, I led her back to her hopcar. I didn't watch her leave; instead, I turned away and trudged across the crater floor to my habidome.

In the main room, between the dining table and my narrow bed, the medirobot's casket-like diagnostic chamber still yawned open, just as I had left it after the checkup two weeks ago that had changed everything.

I sat at the table and stared at the chamber.

For fifty years, the medirobot had found nothing wrong with me beyond the usual ravages of time. My heart was strong; my bones, after so many years at low gravity, were not, but there were effective treatments for that, once I returned to a planetary environment.

The results of my last physical had been...different.

Perhaps I had missed a scheduled check-up; it seemed likely. I passed my time in ritual and work, each day the same as the one before. And my days, governed by Earth's rotational period, bore no relationship to the alternating sunlight and darkness that crept across the eternal lunar landscape. I might well have misplaced a month; perhaps even a year.

And perhaps the habidome's shielding was not what it should have been; perhaps it had not stopped as much of fifty years of sleeting radiation as it should have.

Whatever the reason, I had gone from being healthy on my second-last checkup to anything but on my last one. This time, the nanoprobes that searched every nook and cranny of my body, like the spies the children of Israel sent into the promised land, brought back report of giants in the land: an explosively metastasizing cancer that had already colonized much of my body.

It meant the end of my time at the shrine. Within 24 hours, the automated hopcar that brought me supplies would arrive, and I would ride it back to Apollo City, to see what modern medicine could do for me. Perhaps nanotechnology or gene therapy or some new treatment could keep me alive for many more years, even decades. Perhaps not. Either way, my time here was done.

In a way, I felt relieved. I did not regret joining the Order; I did not regret the hermitic life; I did not doubt my decision to serve God. But I had wondered, in the years since the last pilgrim had visited, if perhaps I could not have served God better on my own world, perhaps in the monastery whose white walls, looming above our farm, had so fascinated me as a child.

Tia's visit made me question my devotion to the shrine even more. If most of humanity no longer knew the shrine existed, or cared, why should I?

I took off the gold-trimmed, dark green vestments I had donned for Tia's visit, and climbed into the medirobot's chamber. The robot stabbed me in the arm, dispensing a little of the pain medicine that helped me sleep. I climbed stiffly out, dimmed the lights, lay down on my bed, and slept.