The Beautiful Side of the Moon

by Leye Adenle

  We had been taken into the spaceship. Everything inside was a colour I can only describe as silver. It was not silver, but a new and different colour I had never seen before and that I do not have a name for; but from the way it was reflective and neutral and unlike any other colour, I can only describe it as silver.

  You could see through the entire top half of the ship, but it was not like looking out through a window. You could tell that you were looking through the solid metallic material of the ship. It gave the world outside a sort of greyish metallic hue. Looking closely you could see where the panels of the dome met and even the circuitry and the technology inside. The lower half of the ship was opaque. We were standing in the middle of the floor, but there was no evidence of the opening through which we had been transported by the ‘organic’ light, and the inside of the ship was not spinning. Four smooth ‘silver’ chairs that were more like curved chaises longues were arranged in a circle facing inwards towards each other.

  They were perfectly still but they had no connection to the ground or the walls. They just floated in fixed positions in space. They were shaped to fit the outline of a person lying down. There was a ridge to separate the legs. The armrests were cut into the surface, and led to indentations for the palms and fingers. All the chairs were the same size. They were built for people much bigger than us. My mother climbed into one of them. As she rested her palms in place, the metal began to move and close in on her, forming a perfect fit for her body. ‘Get in,’ she said.

  I began to climb into the next chair. It was solid and cool. I adjusted my body in the oversized space and laid my palms into the indentations.

  The chair moved against my body. It gently moulded around me till I was snugly secured in its grip, lying down facing the sky, my heart beating with excitement and fear.

  ‘Remember to breathe,’ my mother said.

  I did not feel the ship moving, but the clouds in the sky above steadily got more and more sparse; then there were no clouds, only blue sky. Then there was no blue sky but a blackness that spread and filled the dome of the ship.

  ‘Look,’ my mother said.

  The ship tilted and light appeared at the edge of the darkness. It was the Earth, scrolling up before my eyes, a radiant blue body with a thin white hue clinging to its curvature. I had seen pictures of the Earth from space, but a picture could never capture the awesomeness of its beautiful sharp glow in the vastness of black space speckled with more stars that I had ever seen. From that distance, Mother Earth dominated the universe. She truly looked like the centre of everything. As we sailed further away, the blue and brown of the oceans and the continents beneath white swirls of clouds became less distinct until the Earth hung like a marble ball in the blackness of space.

  Our world slid away from my view. The stars above me grew dim, until they became lost in the darkness.

  My mother sat up in her chair. She got to her feet and stood watching me.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ I said. She nodded.

  I did not know how to get out of the chair. I began to lift myself and the metal relinquished its snug hold on me. My mother walked to the wall behind her chair. She stretched her hand to the metallic body of the craft and it opened like the shutter of a camera. She reached in and pulled out a grey, rubbery looking suit. It had legs and arms that ended in feet and gloves. The suit had a hood made of the same material, and the hood had a face with two large, golden oval eyes which reflected everything. There were no other features on the suit, no pockets, no belts, no zippers, nothing. I did not know how it could be worn.

  My mother removed her wrapper and her blouse and dropped them onto the floor of the spaceship. She held the suit by the shoulders and it opened up along the back. She stepped in and it shrank around her body, clinging to her like it was her skin.

  She faced me. She looked like the grey aliens in UFO movies. I could see the ridge of her nose and the outline of her ears but there were no holes in the suit. She turned her palm to me and I imagined her blank look under the suit, expecting me to understand what she had refused to adequately communicate.

  I got my own suit out from behind my chair and put it on the way I had seen her do, feeling the material wrap itself against me.

  ‘This will protect your from the moon’s radiation for up to forty days,’ my mother said.

  It sounded as if she was in my suit with me. ‘I can breathe,’ I said.

  I had been anxious over how breathing would be possible in the suit.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘The suit will give you up to forty days of oxygen.’

  I held my hands before me and looked at them through the golden lens. They appeared white. I looked up at the dome. Above me was only darkness. I did not understand why the moon was so dark.

  ‘Are you ready?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  She took my hand.

  Chapter 45 Red Eye Speaks

  My mother and I stood side by side in the centre of the ship. I held my breath as I waited for something to happen, watching the silvery floor beneath our feet with suspicion. The muscles of my legs tensed as I anticipated a hole materialising beneath us and I tried to resist the urge to jump away. Nothing happened, and we continued to stand in silence. I looked at my mother. She still hadn’t let go of my hand but even with her spacesuit on, I could tell that she wasn’t looking at me at me. She stared blankly ahead, her thoughts as unreadable as they had always been.

  As I studied her profile, my eyes were drawn to tiny sparks of white light bursting out of nothing around us. The silent sparks multiplied and swirled. In a few seconds we were enveloped in a column of light and I could not see beyond the whiteness that surrounded us. I looked down and there was no ground beneath my feet, just brilliant white. I held my mother’s hand tighter, but we were not falling. We were suspended in place in the light, and it was the light that moved, not us. It swirled round and round in an upward pattern. I looked up to where the current of light was leading, and felt the firmness of the ground beneath my feet.

  My mother let go of me. I looked down as the light broke away into sparks that gradually died out. The ground was grey. I raised my leg and my body swayed gently to one side. I grabbed my mother’s hand again. I steadied myself and watched dust rise from where I’d placed my foot back down. I looked around. We were in a crater the size of a football field. About forty feet deep, and with a slope that looked impossible to climb. Beyond the crater was darkness. I looked up. Our ship was silently spinning above our heads.

  ‘There are two things you have to know,’ my mother said. ‘He knows who you are, and he knew you would come.’

  ‘Who else is here?’ I asked.

  ‘On the beautiful side of the moon, a colony of magicians like him. There used to be just three, but now there are more. No one knows how many. And they want you to join them.’

  ‘Why are they on the moon?’

  ‘You’ve learnt of the Great Schism. Before that there was the Great War. They lost and they were banished from the Earth so they came here. They want to return. If they succeed, they will make slaves of all humans. Come.’ She took my hand and stepped forward, pulling me with her. Our feet left the ground and we were afloat for a second. I felt I had to keep going or I would tip over. We took bouncing strides until we were facing the grey, dusty slope of the crater. It was as if the entire surface of the moon was covered in sand and rocks.

  ‘One more thing,’ my mother said. ‘You cannot believe anything he tells you, no matter what he says.’

  She let go of my hand and watched me. The alien eyes of her spacesuit transmitted the familiar intensity of her stare. I looked up at the wall of rock. It was impossible to climb or bounce out of the crater, and somehow I knew that I could not fly on the moon like I could on Earth. A three-foot wide square of rock lifted off the face of the wall before us. It moved outwards then pivoted up, revealing a dark hole beneath it. A reflective black sphere the size of a football float
ed out of the hole. I saw myself, my mother, our ship, and the crater, all curved around the glass-like surface of the ball.

  A thin blue line formed across the front of the sphere and separated like eyelids. Beneath the eyelid was silver and it had a large red ‘iris’ in the middle. The red expanded and contracted as if focusing on us. The sphere turned to me. I felt the eye looking at me. It turned to my mother. The voice of Titus Titus spoke from it.

  ‘Itohan. What a surprise. Twice in one day. We really should stop meeting like this. And I see you’ve brought the tenderfoot with you. Itohan, Itohan, you of all people know the rules. You cannot be here.’

  ‘This is as far as I go. I want the girl.’

  ‘And why would I give her to you?’

  ‘Take my son. He is the one you want.’

  Chapter 46 Lost in A Crater

  I looked at my mother. She did not turn to look at me. ‘Mother,’ I said, but she did not answer.

  I could not believe she had offered me in return for Rachel. When she said she could take me to the moon, I had thought it was just to get Rachel back. Trading my life for hers had not been on the table. Maybe that was what she meant when she said I might not come back if I went to the moon. She knew she would have sacrifice me to get Rachel back.

  ‘Mother,’ I said again. She was looking straight into the red eye. Her alien-like appearance in the space suit suddenly made it feel like she was truly another being; one with no care or concern for my safety. But beneath the grey suit was my mother, and she wouldn’t leave me to die alone on the moon. She must have a plan, and one that didn’t involve my death. She was playing a trick on Titus Titus. He would release Rachel to her and we would all escape on my mother’s ship.

  ‘Your son for an ordinary girl?’ Titus Titus said through the eye.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know the rules, Itohan. You cannot break them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If you do, the truce is broken and your dear humans will pay.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I give you the girl and you give me your son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No tomfoolery now. You take the girl and leave, and I keep him. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why then, we have deal. You can have the girl.’

  ‘She must not be hurt in anyway.’

  ‘Ah ha! Now I understand. The girl is fine. You lose.’

  The eyelid closed over the red eye and the black sphere floated back into the hole in the wall of the crater. The lid closed over the hole and only the silence of moon sur- rounded us.

  ‘What does he mean, you lose?’ I asked.

  ‘He thought I was trying to trick him.’

  ‘Weren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  From the corner of my golden goggles I saw a disc-shaped light approaching noiselessly. The craft hovered above and to the side of ours. A shaft of light stretched out from the underside and hit the ground directly below it. Rachel descended down through the light, suspended on her back, her arms and legs sprawled. She wasn’t wearing any protective suit.

  My mother walked into the light and caught Rachel’s body in her arms. With the second ship’s light still upon her, light from our own ship stretched down and moved across the surface of the moon towards her, until the two lights met and my mother and Rachel were at their inter- section. The first light fell away and the ship flew off the way it had come. My mother and Rachel were carried up to our ship and it darted into the black sky, hovered for a moment as a luminous speck in the distance, then shot across the sky and away from my view. I stood alone in the crater on the moon.

  Chapter 47 Desolation Rock

  I stared at the darkness above the crater. I waited for my mother’s ship to return. She did not come back. I was afraid. I stared and stared at the blackness and I hoped she would return before it was too late for the plan she had to be put into action, but the darkness remained constant and undisturbed. She did not come back.

  I walked away from where the red eye had emerged and I tried to fly out of the crater but I could not. I already knew I would not be able to fly on the moon, but I feared that I had also lost all of the magic I’d learnt on Earth. I re- turned to the wall of the crater and tried to climb out, but the slope worked against me and the diminished gravity did nothing to propel me to freedom.

  Any time, I thought, the hole in the face of the crater’s wall would open and the eye would return. Or another spaceship would arrive above the crater and take me to him, to Titus Titus, who had won me in a trade for another life. But the walls of the crater did not open and a spaceship did not come.

  Fear gave way to boredom.

  I kicked at the grey ground to watch the sand rise and fall slower than sand would rise and fall on Earth. It was as if I was watching a movie in slow motion through the lens of my suit. My eyes settled on a little rock that looked like a tiny degraded pyramid. I bent to pick up the rock and look under it for a barcode, knowing there wouldn’t be one. I shook my head thinking of the people on Earth who still held firm that man had never been to the moon and America had filmed the entire Apollo mission on Earth. If only they could see me now.

  I took a single step forward and said out loud, ‘One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.’ I tried to do Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. I was as bad at it on the moon as I was on Earth. I pranced around, considered the depth of the crater over and over again, and inspected every bit of its wall for a way out.

  Hours went by and my grey rocky surroundings remained constant. The length and depth of my thoughts were the only evidence of the passing of time. Fear returned and dissolved over and over again. My heart exhausted its strength to beat fast. My spirit tired of its fear. Loneliness replaced everything. Loneliness on the moon was different and strange. I longed for the enemy’s ship that I had feared would come. I longed for the red eye, for its voice that at least sounded human. It didn’t matter whose voice it was. I was alone on the moon. I did not know whether I had been betrayed or sacrificed. I did not know what fate awaited me. I did not know anything. Any trace of another life would have satisfied a need I had never confronted before. You are not human without another human to relate to.

  The hours passed. I explored every inch of the crater until I was bored of seeing the same rocks again. I sat on the lunar surface that was hard beneath its soft layer of dust, and I thought of the plight of a prisoner punished with solitary confinement, without a clock to tell the time, or a changing sky to guess it by. In the end, the absolute constancy of my predicament, the perfect uniformity of my situation, not being able to watch the hands of a watch or the neon digital count-up of time ticking away, was what got me. I had been left alone on the moon, in a crater indistinguishable from any other. Back on Earth, people would look up at the night sky and see the silvery luminance of the distant moon, but they would not suspect that there was a human being like them sitting along in a hole, abandoned and stranded.

  What if this was my end? What if Titus Titus never came to take me, and my mother never returned to save me? What if I died in the crater and my human body was reduced to bones under the strange fabric of my space- suit? What if this was the plan all along? What if it was not a plan but a deception? What if this was a thing that could happen to anyone, and some saw the snare and avoided it while some fell for it? What if only I had fallen for it?

  Perhaps there were infinite craters on infinite moons, graveyards to infinite fools like me who had thought they could fly, that their mothers could slay dragons, and that they were something special?

  What if hubris had lured me to a lonely, painful death?

  I cried in my space suit.

  The hours stretched into days counted by sleeping and waking.

  The days stretched into melancholy and regret. Sadness and fear, through hunger and thirst, multiplied. Absolute fear became absolute madness.

  Out of the corner of my lens I would see a rock shift u
pon the lunar surface. When I turned to catch its intent, its motion would have ended and with not a particle of dust falling in low gravity. In the cocoon of my spacesuit I would hear voices whispering, but as soon as I listened to what they said they would stop. I would continue to listen, but they wouldn’t talk again until I had stopped paying attention to them. I screamed. I cried. I swore. I laughed. I was going mad, but at least I still knew it.

  Then, at the apex of my lonesome sorrow, death arrived in the failing of the breathing apparatus embedded somewhere in the essence of my spacesuit. I remembered what my mother had said, that the suit afforded me forty days of support, and I felt a burst of elation. In that total, absolute, unyielding, and relentless wilderness, any event would have made a difference. I approached my death with the excitement of discovery for, at last, I knew how many days had passed.

  Chapter 48 Through an Infant’s Eyes

  ‘Traveller, your life support system will soon expire. If you have another one, you must go to a safe place and change into it now. This one will expire by the time I count to one thousand, by which time you will have died. If you do not wish to hear me counting, you may say stop at any time. One, two, three, four, five… ’

  The female voice of the suit was the first voice I’d heard since I’d been abandoned on the moon. It was as passionless and impersonal as a pre-recorded message could be, yet listening to it count up to my death was the most soothing thing I had ever experienced. It was the voice of another human. It was sweet and it was beautiful, and in it I heard the voices of all the people I had ever known.