The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow

by Linda Talbot

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  The Mission

  From the craters of the Moon white streaks darted in a restless dance. As the Moon's surface glowered and grew cold, moving into the long lunar night, the streaks which men on Earth had long pondered, grew more agitated, as though transmitting a mystic message.

  Moon watchers on Earth transferred to more powerful telescopes, speculating on the unaccustomed activity. The Earth's day advanced, the dancing moon shafts dimmed. The next night they were barely visible.

  Sean ran from the farmhouse in the morning mist, scattering hens and heading for the cowshed. There, the new calf was already stepping confidently through the straw.

  Three year old Sean had large blue eyes, flaxen hair and a strangely pale complexion. At twilight it bloomed, translucent, as though its earthly elasticity had been replaced by some ethereal force. His parents smiled, perceiving nothing. All sons are unique.

  One day when Sean was six and at his first school, being teased for his gentle looks, he astounded and finally silenced his companions by leaping a clear ten metres low in the air, across the playground. Gravity might have left the soles of his feet.

  The first spring sun shed light on the garden by the farmhouse door. Sean's mother, hoeing, was used to watching the restless figure of her son. She was unaware that the shadow he cast on the ground, had an exceptionally sharp edge.

  That summer was stifling yet Sean, now eight years old, did not sweat. He ran and made his weightless leaps across the fields and returned with bone dry clothes.

  The following winter brought exceptionally clear skies as the frosts grew harder. One night Sean's father found his child standing in the yard in his pyjamas, gazing fixedly at the full Moon. The temperature had dropped below freezing but Sean did not even shiver and was angry on being ordered back to bed.

  He grew increasingly solitary, disappearing for the best part of a day in the fields. His parents noticed that, unlike other children, he could play for hours without demanding a drink and as time passed, he displayed a positive dislike of liquids.

  Each month at full Moon, Sean got out of bed and was found by his father in the yard.

  "Is he sleep walking?" asked his mother. But Sean was always wide awake, gazing, his blue eyes reflecting the moonlight. He cried when his father steered him back to bed and he opened the curtains so the distant face of the Moon was visible.

  "What do you want to be when you leave us?" asked Sean's teacher one day, when he was sixteen and about to consider a career.

  "An astronaut," he replied without hesitation. His class mates laughed.

  "Reaching for the Moon," joked his teacher. Sean did not laugh. His pale blue eyes opened very wide and fixing them coldly on the master, he said, "Yes."

  Sean's parents gasped when he told them he would apply for training. "It's so dangerous," his mother objected, for the job still had the aura of the early Earth explorers who were convinced that after encountering men with heads in their chests, they would sail over the world's edge.

  "It takes rare qualities. You don't look strong enough to me," commented his father, who as a salesman, had long lived with a sense of futility and was not sure he wanted to see his son succeed where he had failed.

  Sean simply turned his cold eyes on them, a faint smile passing like a ghost across his lips. He lacked teenage defiance but had a confidence beyond his years. He seemed to live with some secret, remote from reality. Still at full Moon he got up and stood, transfixed in the yard, watching the shadowed face of the Moon as though some memory was moving through the mists of his mind.

  Surprisingly, he was accepted for training. His small frame had a rare flexibility and endurance. His scientific knowledge was outstanding and he had a remarkable aptitude for the obligatory tests. And still he could take long leaps, defying the force of gravity.

  Shuttles moved constantly between Earth and Moon. Scientific data was still being gleaned and with typical irony, a military base being built near the Sea of Tranquillity.

  Sean, recruited among the scientists, was assigned to Praxas, a ship almost completed and due for launching in three weeks. As the day approached, his parents' fears increased, while Sean was buoyant. A new light was perceptible in his blue eyes. His mother could not be sure, but she believed she saw strange forms reflected there.

  His parents watched the launch on television; the sleek craft thrusting through the Earth's atmosphere, seeking as though with a will remote from man, the pallid face of the half spent Moon, intermittently obscured by cloud.

  When the craft had gone, an uncanny silence settled in its wake; the farm unmoving too, the animals subdued. The cloud cleared and the Moon shed a fierce white light on the land.

  Sean's parents flinched from the vivid light that for some seconds illuminated the yard like day. Then the clouds returned and darkness enveloped the Earth.

  Sean, sent with his colleagues to more fully explore the dark side of the Moon, sped beyond the hindrance of humanity. On leaving the Earth's atmosphere, its petty preoccupations fell away. Earthlings were seen in perspective, like termites caught in a cul-de-sac, unable to perceive the odds stacked against them.

  The stars wilfully pricked infinity, their density a constant challenge to the imposition of earthbound discipline; limitations essential to the minute mind of man. Meteors moved through the cosmic order; where once a star was carefully catalogued, yawned blackness and those about the newly created chasm, assumed fresh status.

  The Moon exerted more influence. The man-made shell of the space craft regulated the elements essential to moving through far dimensions but the void gained a perceptible hold, isolating the astronauts' minds until, forced inwards, they encountered fear.

  Only Sean still felt buoyant, with an increasing and inexplicable sense of relief as he watched the Moon move closer; the dry plains that men had named "Seas", taking shape; those of Fertility, Nectar, Vapour. The Seas of Cloud, Moisture and Crises, the Bays of Dew and Billows.

  He felt an uncanny sense of homecoming as the features he was compelled to consider each month when the Moon was full, unfolded and gained substance.

  The landing was smooth, as though the craft was drawn to the Moon's surface by a silently silken force that would not be denied. Sean's colleagues prepared to emerge; an elaborate ritual charged with tension, while Sean felt calm, as though about to encounter his natural element.

  It was half way through the long lunar night, the Moon racked by penetrating cold. Although the last to prepare, Sean stepped first from the craft.

  He was carried by some prodigious power across the dark surface to the edge of a crater, definable only by its rim running in a curved black crust as though derived from the dawn of creation.

  A sudden shaft of white light shot from within; a physical force that almost knocked Sean off his feet. He stumbled, a hand raised to his eyes.

  His colleagues had left for the dark side of the Moon, assuming he had preceded them. As he was riveted by the persistent light, he experienced the fullness of that affinity with the Moon that he had sensed on Earth.

  Unable to influence his movements, he glided as the white light subsided, across the rocks to the top of a ragged rise. From there he could see the military base, barely begun and waiting for a second contingent of scientists and overseers. Its domes and the pointed nozzles of missiles gleamed obscenely.

  In a terrifying flash, Sean was granted the gift of foresight. He saw, not two years hence, men activating the rockets which thrust into the velvet dark, seeking with a cold, blind will, a target on Earth. He saw sudden and total dissolution, the unspeakable end of a pathetic yet persistent hope, the Earth lost from sight as the Moon moved implacably through her phases, her influence superseded by that of man.

  Sean moved towards the silent installation. His feet were primed with purpose as he reached the first devices; the deadly network of destruction. Throughout the long lunar night he worked, his hands charged with inhuman strength and wit
h a knowledge beyond any he had consciously acquired.

  As the new lunar day dawned, he halted, weary, as though emerging from dream, unable to recognise the machines that with a simple, secret application, had been dismantled.

  Back on board before his colleagues, he claimed to have blacked out, then returned to the craft. They had come back baffled by the Moon's secret face and blandly accepted his explanation.

  The return to Earth was uneventful. As they entered the Earth's atmosphere, Sean had no recollection of the past weeks. He had completed a mission that had no substance. Yet as he looked at the non-committal face of the receding Moon, a desolation lay fleetingly on him, as penetrating as a parting from someone deeply loved.

  The farm lived on; linked to the universal cycle. Sean rediscovered its earthbound procreation; his feet now unable to defy gravity.

  He was confronted by news of the inexplicable tampering with the military base on the Moon. Teams of experts worked overtime to restore the means of mass destruction.

  Sean's parents noticed as he watched the televised activities, a white light almost obscuring the strange blue of his eyes and later that night, he went outside to gaze, as he had when a child, at the calm face of the full Moon.

  War was imminent. And as the Moonbase was drawn into the potential conflict, Sean had a sense of having failed in some onerous task. He remembered nothing of the Moon mission. Yet some distant memory stirred, especially at night; the sensation of some great effort made to no avail.

  Unaccountably, he was drawn to the sea. The Moon was manipulating the tides recklessly, as though impressing a last warning on mankind. But heedlessly, the small men who had been briefly aware of some universal song to which they could not put words, who had watched and wondered at those white streaks that were the lunar forces seeking expression through the body of a man, pursued their path of self destruction.

  Sean walked towards the sea. Drawn by the pale mistress who had rejected man's violation on her silent surface, he crossed the tide line and without an upward glance at her, took his last walk on Earth.

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