Fiction River: Moonscapes (17 page)

So It just sat on its chalky world and occasionally pulled languidly at the tides to make them higher or lower than usual, trying to capsize their little boats and mess with their summer homes on the seashores. They were harder to scare now, though, It noticed, and that made such pastimes significantly less fun. It tried changing Its cloak of energy to give them red or yellow or fat white moons, like It had done in the past, just to be ominous and sort of scary, but when all they did was ooh and ahh and take photographs with their hand-held phones, It got exceedingly irritated, and then refused to change colors at all.

Those little monkeys down on that yummy blue planet It so wanted to eat had grown jaded. They had grown indifferent to the moon’s machinations.

It began to worry It might actually be depressed.

From watching television, It began to wonder if not enough exercising and consuming too many processed foods and oversleeping might be Its problem...and then It thought that maybe Its problem was watching far too much television.

It began to feel persecuted.

Discouraged and now tired after attempting to figure out Pilates and failing miserably, It wondered if It would lose Its mind in this horrible place. Since It really was
only
mind, though...only thought, only energy or undifferentiated matter...It recognized that It needed to resolve Its horrible, gnawing hunger in some way, regardless, and no matter how alone and misunderstood It felt.

It slept, pondering this.

It slept, and dreamed of luscious blue planets and mammals with strange, fluffy white hats crooning over and stroking crispy fried animal carcasses covered in sticky sauces and peppered in mint leaves.

It slept, and for a short time, It was happy.

***

It slept for a very long time.

So long, It receded into the chalky dirt, clay and dust.

It sank into caves beneath the surface of the little white moon, inside places where water once lived, and even some living creatures, before It sucked them out, like marrow from the moon’s bones, and swallowed what remained of the sky, too, and a light atmosphere It could only describe as ‘minty fresh,’ which again, It probably only thought because of all of the television on that larger blue world.

When It next awoke, It did not understand at first, where It was.

Nor did It understand what It was doing there...or why everything suddenly seemed so noisy, and why so much tapping seemed to be going on, all around it. Tapping and vibrating and jittering as feet moved through the chalky white, as they ruffled the surface chasing volleyballs and riding solar-powered go-carts.

It stared out at the stars cutting diamonds in the deep black of space, and a longing overcame It. It remembered faster, less petty and small times, with big crashes and booms and swiftly changing vistas filled with carbon-based lifeforms and trees that looked like cauliflower or hydras or squat people pointing angry fingers at It, right before It ate them whole.

It watched a star, now a darker yellow than that last star It remembered, and gazed out over a planet that looked less blue that It remembered, too.

On the moon Itself, mammals cavorted.

They had made their moon city, at last.

The moon city had crept over Its skin while It slept.

They sat on moon mats, basking on the chalky dust that had become Its skin. They lounged by moon pools, eating moon pies, getting moon massages by petite moon mammals with curly, moon-white hair, bright red lipstick and roller skates, along with silver-white moon miniskirts that looked like they’d been fashioned out of tin foil and straightened with coat hanger wires. They played moon golf, and moon volleyball and moon badminton. They swam in the mammal-made moon lake under a thick, plexiglas dome with artificial moon-gravity boosters...or they sat beside it on moon loungers drinking moon colas with white, spaceman straws hanging over the cup’s edges like the moon version of tropical umbrellas. They slept in moon beds in moon hotels and moon condominiums, took moon tours and held down moon jobs, bought moon rocks and contemplated moon holographic landscapes trapped in hand-held baubles to bring back home.

It had become Moonopolis while It slept.

It looked at all of them, weak with hunger, and wondered, would it be enough?

If It ate all of them now, would it be enough?

It looked at the blue planet, which shone with far less blue now, kind of a brownish-grayish-green, really, and wondered if the mammals were more like It than It had realized. It saw elevators positioned in the sky there, between the moon and that decidedly muddy-looking world, and reached for them limply, but It didn’t have quite enough strength to get all the way to those, either.

Anyway, It was no longer sure It was the same as It had been before that last, rather unwisely long nap of Its, inside the surface of this rather mammal-covered moon. It might be a bit too chalky and moon-dusty Itself to be able to fully wrest Itself from those chalk floors without some really serious amounts of food, or maybe a lift from some passing freighter with room for a very hungry It-like thing coated in a heck of a lot of moon rocks and dust.

It added one additional problem to Its list of problems.

It might not get to the blue planet before the blue planet ran out of enough food to get It anywhere else afterwards.

It considered eating all of the mammals living on Its skin, right now. If It consumed all of them very, very quickly...quickly enough to make it to the brownish-green planet, then perhaps there would be
just enough
food on that larger world to propel It to the next world, and the next...

Then, something terrible happened.

It had an existential crisis, wondering at the purpose of Its life.

It wanted to go home, but It had no memory of a place like that.

It wanted apple pie, and someone called ‘mother.’

It wanted to hang out with friends at an eating establishment, and have them all know It.

It wanted to join a rock band, and maybe get a tattoo.

It watched the sun expand, darken, turn colder, and knew that It might have to witness Its own death in a few short years, in any case.

It didn’t really think the brown-green planet looked all that inviting, after all. And anyway, It was feeling ponderously heavy now, exhaustively so.

It decided It would wait for a better option.

It wondered if It could catch up on the last one hundred years of
Iron Chef
while It waited, and if anyone on the blue planet could explain to It what the ending of that new drama,
FourSquare Seven,
meant, if It found a way to ask them through the electrical system. It also wondered how It had managed to sleep through the cancellation of
Death Spawn from Outer Space.

It munched on a few of the mammals while It thought about this, picking them off from a moon dune buggy as it bounced along the dark side of Its skin. It decided they probably wouldn’t miss just a few of them, here and there.

Eating them only made It slightly despondent, however, and a little bit gaseously unpredictable.

It wondered why It got so little pleasure from eating them, despite how hungry It was. It decided these mammals were Its nemeses, Its harbingers of death, Its soul-sucking succubi...Its end of good times, fast living and Its ability to see and experience new worlds. It decided these mammals were very, very bad...perhaps even Its own version of the evil after the Fall, only without the apple and the snake, just a countless number of syndicated
Law and Order
spinoffs, talk shows and inscrutable cable infomercials.

It was bitter and hungry before, but now It was mainly confused.

Confused, and somewhat uncertain about what came next.

It crumbled Its crumbly bits on the edges of the Moonopolis Moon Settlement, causing a minor landslide as It contemplated messing with the tides on Earth, but now that whole exercise just felt pointless to It.

It watched the mammals bat a small yellow ball back and forth across a tennis net in the Moontastic Resort Number Four as It surfed channels on the satellites, which now hovered like a band of asteroids over most of the orbit of Earth, making the view between It and the blue world almost impossible to discern in detail.

Many, many movies had been made while It last slept.

It would take It many, many years to watch them all.

It munched on a small child that wandered too close to the edge of the Moontastic Moon Safety Space Dome, figuring the parents would blame themselves when they couldn’t find it. It munched and chewed and decided that all of that eating and flying between worlds might just be too much bother.

Brushing the last little bits of the tiny mammal out of Its extraneous edges, It relaxed into the chalky dust and rock surface of the tiny white-faced moon. A contented feeling expanded over It, as It realized something rather wonderful.

It was already home.

Introduction to “
The Verdant Gene”

Award-winning writer Marcelle Dubé writes mystery, science fiction, fantasy and the occasional romance. Carina Press published her first novel,
On Her Trail
, as well as the first novel in her Mendenhall Mystery series,
The Shoeless Kid.
Since then, Falcon Ridge Publishing has taken over the series. She grew up near Montreal and now lives in the Yukon where, she says, “people outnumber carnivores, but not by much.”

About “The Verdant Gene,” she writes, “Every culture on Earth has been fascinated by the moon. And why not? It fills our night sky with mystery and myth, lights up romance as well as murder, and triggers huge tides when it’s at perigee. From there it’s only a short step to wondering what else a moon at perigee might trigger…”

The Verdant Gene

Marcelle Dubé

We landed on Verdant one hundred and three years ago, in what turned out to be Year Three of the thirty-year Cycle.

In a stroke of cosmic bad luck, the probes that explored Verdant and mapped its solar system did so at apogee, when Castor and Pollux, the twin moons, were stable in the sky at the farthest they would be from Verdant, and each other. How were we to know that this stability would only last a year?

It took the original colonists a few years to realize that Verdant’s moons were slowly drawing closer to each other and to the planet. The attendant tides and wild weather soon made the colonists relocate the settlement to higher, more protected ground, but it was only at Year Fifteen of the Cycle, at perigee, that the colonists understood the full impact of the moons’ strange dance.

There have only been three Perigee Years since we landed on Verdant. With each one, we were better prepared to survive the physical onslaughts of storm and surge. But with each one, we lost more and more people to the Cycle madness.

***

Rachel was on the tube train before she realized that she’d left her coat at the lab. The argument with Aisha—Dr. Aisha Bennatro, friend and colleague—had knocked it from her mind.

She shivered a little, crossing her arms over her chest in an effort to warm up. It was full summer in the capital city of Haida, which should have meant humidity and heat, but perigee was tonight, and cold air had rushed in as soon as the winds rose.

Rachel glanced out the window. The storm was getting worse. The lush vegetation for which Verdant was named whipped frantically in the wind, flinging twigs and flowers in the air.

The car was close to empty, as were the streets below the elevated rail. She was a little surprised, but grateful, that the train still ran. The university where her daughter studied had a good shelter, but Rachel didn’t like the thought of Eliane stuck there for the duration of the storm, which could last anywhere from six hours to six days.

If Eliane even went to the shelter. Perigee seemed to trigger a compulsion in those who had the Verdant gene, a mutation that began to appear in the first generation born on Verdant. Without fail, they tried to leave the protection of the shelters during the storms. No one understood why, but Rachel and Aisha had been working on trying to understand for years. Over the past year, as perigee grew closer, they had grown apart in their approaches to a solution, to the point where they could not even be in the same room without arguing.

And now, Aisha had permission from the ethics committee to use the experimental inoculation, C15, much to Rachel’s dismay. She had been about to go find Eliane when she heard about the approval. The committee had snuck it in while they thought no one would be paying attention.

She found her old friend alone in the underground lab, everyone else having left for their home shelter or the lab’s. Aisha sat at her console, dividing her attention between the holographic formula in front of her and the keypad at her fingertips.

“Aisha,” said Rachel, barging in and startling the older woman. “We’re just not
ready
to inoculate anyone. The C15 is still experimental.”