The Moon Dreams of Water
by Kassandra Kelly
Edgar was dreaming of the ocean when his phone rang.
Magdalen. He sat up in his bunk and rubbed sleep out of his eyes. She knew it was the middle of the night; she did it on purpose. Even on Earth it was still night.
Edgar touched the screen and Magdalen’s hairdo materialized. “Edgar, I’ve had a complaint.”
He tried to focus on her swirled and frothy hair which was so elaborate her little face looked like an afterthought. Below it, she was an ordinary middle-aged Earth woman, more or less his mother’s age. Edgar used to think that might be a foundation for their working relationship. He loved his mother.
“Complaint?”
“What’s wrong with your hair, Edgar?”
“My hair?” He reached up and felt his own locks writhing. There was some G on the Moon, and the living stations added a little more, but things still floated around on their own a good deal. He bent over and found his hat on the floor tethered beneath his boot heel. “Better?”
“You look unwashed.” She frowned. It must be summer, Earth time, because she wore a light pink thing with little straps. She had season-specific night clothes; Edgar had seen them all.
“You want me to wash my hair, send more water.”
“Never mind that, Edgar. A Richardson College viewer said you didn’t rotate number 232.”
“Number 232 is not Richardson’s cheese.”
“But you forgot to turn it.”
“Richardson’s cheese is number 791 and it’s in Cave Carpatus. 232 is in Sinuous. That’s a whole different feed—you need a password.”
“That may be, Edgar, but we aren’t running a military installation. We’re aging cheese. Have you cleaned Euler yet?”
Fucking Euler. Edgar rubbed his eyes. “Today, Magdalen.”
“Good. And please go rotate 232.” She clicked off, leaving the company logo where her face used to be. Edgar stared at it blankly. “The Moon Works For You!” and “Watch Us Grow!” encircled a smiling quarter-moon slice of green cheese.
He put on his boots, no socks. His underwear was sprung from wear and swam around his thighs. He ought to break in another pair but he liked these. His mother sent them.
Water at Luna-Cheese was for the cheese, with a ration left over for drinking. There were liters of a jelly compound you were supposed to use for body maintenance. Every few weeks Edgar slathered it on and scraped it off, but it wasn’t like bathing.
It didn’t matter. No one from Earth saw anything but his gloved hands in the video feeds. He was supposed to wear a bio-suit when servicing the cheese, but it had been months since Edgar had bothered. And Bobby Finestra, who worked the other shift, never wore anything.
There were six caves located below grade, deep in the Moon’s terra: Copernicus, Sinuous, Moltke, Euler, Carpatus and Schrödinger. Four of the caves were for the custom cheeses and two were for supermarket product. A steel cistern of earth water fed moisture to the caves. The constant trickle through the pipes made Edgar ache for fresh water.
He pushed open the wooden door of Sinuous. All the caves were sealed with wood from Earth, and Edgar loved the smooth, living feel of it. The caves themselves were lined with fitted Moon rocks, mostly granite, and were supposed to be hypo-allergenic and completely sanitary. And they all were, except for Euler.
Edgar hadn’t told Magdalen exactly how bad it was in Euler. A weird mossy growth had sprouted on the walls after the last shipment of ripe cheeses had been shipped out. There wasn’t anything like it in the training manual. He and Finestra had solved the problem by locking the door and not going back.
Inside Sinuous, he paused to appreciate musty, moisture-rich air. Finestra said it smelled like sex. To Edgar it smelled like Earth, the humble scent of cooking and growing. Of course he had much less experience of sex than Finestra. Since coming to the Moon, he’d only had one friend, Zoe, and she’d left six months ago.
Malden, Finestra’s latest girlfriend, was a tour guide at the Moon Monument. Every couple of days, she drove to the Luna-Cheese installation in a borrowed Rover, with sacks of McDonalds or Pizza-Hut. Women were uncommon enough on the Moon, especially ones that Finestra hadn’t already pissed off, but one who brought food.... Edgar was half in love with her himself.
He took his gloves from a shelf and walked down a short flight of steps into a cool chamber dense with vapor. It was drier than most cheese caves on Earth, but in the parched atmosphere of the Moon it felt like a rain forest. Three hundred cheeses stood in their delicate sweat.
The cheese was made on Earth and transported to the Moon for aging. It was shipped along with packets of Earth bacteria and water. Each cheese stayed about nine Moon months and it was Edgar’s job to monitor the cave environment and get the finished product ready for shipment. Usually the bacteria died after the cheeses left. Fucking Euler.
Edgar also had to make sure the cheese cameras were focused.
He walked through the rows to cheese 232 and grasped the wooden board. He gave it a hundred and eighty degree turn.
“Thanks, Edgar,” a woman’s voice said through the cheese cam.
“De nada, dude.” Edgar never understood how they all managed to learn his name. He leaned over the cheese to look into the camera’s monitor. The picture was dark, Earth night. “Richardson College?”
“Uh.” Pause. “Yes.”
“You hacked 232’s feed? Dude, why? You people have your own cheese.”
A movement on the monitor pixilated the image as if a shadow had passed over another shadow.
“This one seems lonely. You know?”
Edgar nodded, not that the camera could pick it up from his angle. “The owners stopped payment and moved out to Mars Colony. Their cheese stands alone.”
The woman sighed. “Our college cheese has the glee club, the marching band and dance line rehearsing in front of it twelve hours a day. It didn’t need me.”
“Yeah, people do nutty things.” He picked up the chart for 232 and checked his notes. “I turned 232 on schedule. Says so on the chart.”
“I know. Sorry about that. I just like this side better.”
“Get some sleep, why don’t you?”
Edgar left his gloves at the door and went back to bed.
*
Not all cheeses had their own cameras. Some were just
regular, aged Luna-Cheese cheddars that would be chunked
and sold in the supermarkets on Earth and Mars. But many
cheeses had owners who paid an extra fee for the privilege
of watching and talking to their cheese. Like a lot of Moon
traditions, it made no sense, yet this was where the real
money was.
Most cheeses were owned by schools and institutions as
fundraising gimmicks. Edgar’s grade school had one, and he
remembered telling the cheese about his summer vacation
while staring at the luminous, frosty rind that seemed to
hang in space. Others were owned by serious cheeseheads who
claimed that Moon aging imparted a special quality.
Carpatus Cave had a lot of those cheeses, made with weird
recipes on Earth and then sent here for the Moon
experience.
In Moltke Cave, forty-five cheeses were owned by retirement
homes on Earth and day or night, Edgar could hear dozens of
soft voices talking to the cheeses. Some nights when he
couldn’t sleep, he’d go to Moltke and just listen. The
voices sounded like surf. It was restful.
*
Finestra was making coffee when Edgar dragged himself to
the kitchen the next morning. He wore a pair of yellow
knee-high socks and nothing else. “Don’t say it. I know.
Magdalen called about Euler.”
“In the middle of the night,” Edgar replied. “Also someone
from Richardson College is watching 232. Has a favorite
side.”
“Typical.” Finestra dumped yesterday’s coffee grounds on
the floor. “Isn’t that the Davidson cheese? It’s probably
the kid. She’s in school. Still on Earth.”
The mound of coffee grounds on the floor was higher today.
Yesterday’s grounds were now dry enough to lift off on
their own whenever Finestra kicked them. The whole kitchen
was a hopeless dump. When they first arrived for duty, they
made an effort to cook occasionally. Now they relied on
Malden to deliver fresh food and ate the Luna-Cheese
nutrition packets the rest of the time. Food wrappers,
weighed down by dirty dishes and tools, covered the
counters. There was no reason to clean up since there
weren’t enough germs to rot anything. Finestra had been
known to eat three-week-old pizza.
Edgar wondered what Zoe would have said about the kitchen.
She was an archaeologist, part of a team that took core
samples all over the Moon. She’d been professionally
disappointed and the few times she slept with Edgar had
been after long bouts of drinking when she cried over her
eroding skill set. No life here either.
“I’ll clean it up later,” said Finestra.
“Yeah, sure.”
Edgar carried his coffee out to the solar pad to look at
the sky, treading carefully so the coffee wouldn’t slosh in
his cup. The pad was designed for transport landings and
the doors to the main building locked magnetically when the
roof rolled back. But since there were so few transports,
Edgar brought out a lawn chair and tied it down. He sat
there each morning and watched the creamy blue vision of
his home planet so many miles away. He wasn’t actually sure
how far away it was. Sometimes when he thought about
Magdalen, it didn’t seem far enough. Other times, when he
evaluated his social life, he felt as though he’d been left
to drift in space, forever getting further away from the
place he ought to be.
The comm panel on the wall squealed at him. Finestra’s
voice whistled through the chapped wires: “232’s asking for
you. Think you have a girlfriend, Ed.”
Down on the cheese level, Edgar passed Finestra tapping the
system patch on Euler’s door. “Man, we got to do this.”
“I want to shut off the air a few days before we go in.
Three days.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about waiting,” said Finestra. “I think
maybe there’s still a live camera in there. I can’t
remember if I shut down all the feeds.”
“Jesus. I don’t want to talk about this now.”
Or
ever. Edgar picked up
his gloves as he entered Sinuous. The damp, organic smell
of the place calmed him as he tapped the camera. “Hey, it’s
Edgar.”
The green light on the camera blinked leisurely. “Hey,
Edgar.”
He examined the crusted, living rind of 232. It had the
green flesh and mold blooms that a good Moon cheese was
supposed to have. He wondered if the Richardson College
girl knew the cheese would be ready to send home on the
transport due in twenty-one days.
“Uh, you want to see another side?” he asked.
“My name is Jennifer,” the cam said. “Come closer.”
In order to look into the camera, he had to scrunch down
and put his head next to 232, his chin resting on the
cheese board. He saw the pixilated face of a dark-haired
girl with fluffy cheeks and big eyes. He couldn’t be sure
if she were a live communication or an avatar until she
blew out her cheeks and a piece of hair fluttered onto her
nose. Avatars didn’t have freckles either.
“I thought you’d be older,” she said.
“I think technically I’m younger, Moon time,” he replied.
“How old are you?”
“Old. Twenty.” She sighed again. “It just goes to show. For
nine months I’ve watched you turn the cheese, and I made a
picture of you in my mind. You don’t look anything like I
imagined.”
“Sorry. I guess.” Edgar couldn’t think how to answer.
Jennifer was beautiful.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “You’re cute.
Can you talk for a minute? I want to know all about your
life on the Moon.”
“I’m sitting in a cheese cave with my head next to a
cheddar. Life on the Moon doesn’t get more exciting than
this.”
She laughed and it sounded like water pouring over a glass
of ice cubes.
Edgar learned that Jennifer loved the Moon. As a little
girl, she’d visited the Moon Monument on a field trip and
saw the first human footprints in the fine dust. She
studied the feeds of Moon exploration and archaeology in
grade school. Now she attended Richardson College and
watched their cheese, though 232 was still her favorite.
Finestra was right, 232 had belonged to her family before
they went to Mars.
“Everything on the Moon is silt and dust,” she said. “Even
diamonds are silt. It must be beautiful.”
“We don’t have any diamond deposits,” he explained. “But I
think I know what you mean. The Moon is left behind,
abandoned, floating away.”
“I’ll bet it’s lonely,” she said.
“Not so much.” By now he’d moved the camera so he could sit
on the floor and look at her image. He shrugged as he
said not so
much, though he
knew that when she signed off he would be lonely, more than
he had been before.
“I’d like to visit you,” she said.
“Sure, that would be great.” He could be safely
enthusiastic. No one visited the Moon unless they had a job
or were on a tourist excursion. Luna-Cheese was at the
furthest end of the original settlement, hundreds of miles
from the tourist area. “You’d love the Keplar craters. It
was one of the first places I visited when I got here. You
can get a real Moon experience.”
“Like Apollo?” she asked. “I used to fall asleep imagining
what it would be like to be the first person to land on the
Moon.”
“Not me. I’d be afraid I’d never get home.”
“I’ll visit you, Edgar.”
“Okay, sure.” He moved the camera back to its original
position. His shift had started.
Late that night, he woke up unsettled. Malden had brought
tacos and real beer from the monument, and they’d stayed up
surfing Earth video broadcasts and getting silly. The fresh
food didn’t agree with him after so long on food packets.
He passed Finestra’s room on his way to the toilet and
heard profound snoring from within. It was amazing Malden
could sleep with the guy.
He went down to the cheese level, on the pretext of
double-checking 232’s camera. As he passed Euler, he heard
Jennifer’s voice from the wall comm.
“Edgar? Why is this door locked?”
“You didn’t hack the installation’s comm. Did you?” He
pulled up the menu and saw the green, leisurely beat of an
outside feed. “You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
“I backed out of the cheese cam. It’s easy.” Her voice had
a chalky sound over the installation’s speakers. “But don’t
worry, it’s audio only.”
He looked down at his weeks-old shorts. “Well, good. But
still.”
“If Luna-Cheese cared that much about security, they
wouldn’t have made it so easy to hack.”
“It’s an old system,” he said.
“Tell me about Euler.”
He watched the beat-beat-beat of her feed. “It’s supposed
to be empty. All the cheese shipped out.”
“Let’s go inside, Edgar.”
“No.” His finger hovered over the off switch. “Finestra and
I need to clean it out.”
“I’m audio only. I won’t see anything.”
“Dude, this is weird.” How had she heard about Euler?
Magdalen? He clicked off.
*
Jennifer wasn’t watching 232 the next time he went into
Sinuous. He tapped the cam and checked the feed. There was
nothing wrong. It was prime viewing time for 232, as it had
taken on the hollow-cheeked look of a cheese that had lost
all the moisture it could.
He turned the other cheeses and went back one last time to
see if Jennifer was there.
“It’s Edgar,” he said. “From the Moon?”
Nothing.
He looked for her in the installation’s comm system, and
then went to Carpatus and checked on 791, Richardson’s
cheese. He heard the marching band tuning up. The director
said, “The next clarinet that squeaks will have to march in
front of the trombones.”
Edgar turned up the volume. “Hey, Richardson College, is
Jennifer Davidson there?”
“The cheese is talking!” someone said.
The next thing Edgar saw in the monitor was a man’s bearded
face. “How do you turn—oh, yes. Good.” The monitor went
dark.
On his way upstairs, Edgar paused next to Euler’s door.
Maybe she’d hacked her way inside, but the comm. panel was
dark. He took a cleansing breath and touched the door knob,
then jumped back, horrified. It was warm.
He opened the comm. panel and tapped on Finestra’s room. No
answer. The kitchen. Nothing. “Where are you? I’m getting
some very weird readings from Euler.”
No answer. Dude was probably hung over.
It had to be safe in there. Nothing actually lived on the
Moon. Just an environmental malfunction. Edgar opened the
door.
Not just warm but hot. He stepped into the darkness and
stumbled against a wall of sticky, wet heat. Like a sauna,
hot. A year ago this much heat would have tripped the
alarms for the whole level, but the sensors were shorted
out and replacements were on back-order. He threw the door
open and felt the heave of the old convection cooling
system as it kicked up a notch to compensate for the blast
coming out of Euler.
He went to the system patch and pulled up the menu. Yes,
that was the problem. Air and water were still on, but
climate control had been turned off. Usually, no climate
control meant freezing temperatures at this depth, but
Euler was close to the environmental core of the
installation, and those pipes were hot. He turned climate
control on again and as he backed out of the menu, he saw
the beat-beat-beat of a green light. It winked out before
he could switch to comm mode.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” He closed the patch and waited
until the air was cooler. This time, he grabbed his gloves
before stepping inside. As he felt his way down the steps,
he heard water dripping off the cheese shelves and puddling
on the stone floor. The next thing he noticed was the
smell.
“Wet dog,” he said, remembering his family’s golden
retriever. But this smell was rampant, organic, like
exhaled breath. Breathing through his nose, he pushed on,
stepping between the first rows of tables.
Light wasn’t great in any of the caves but Euler was the
worst. One soffit radiated weakly in the vapor and one
camera spot lit a cheese table. It was true, Finestra had
left the camera on. It focused on a circular stain on the
board, rather like a water mark on a varnished table top.
The feed was, of course, live. He swiveled the camera,
flashing the spot light across the empty table tops, then
moved it higher to catch the glistening stone walls.
Something moved.
Edgar yelped and jumped backwards. The spot flailed around
the cave. He bumped another table and the board smacked to
the floor like a wet bath mat. It took Edgar a moment to go
back, take up the camera.
Shaking, he moved the spot light to the wall and saw what
looked like a curtain billowing in a breeze. It was dark,
bruised purple, thin as skin. For a second, he thought the
way it undulated was beautiful, like a jellyfish piloting
through the ocean.
But this thing was much bigger than the simple moss he’d
seen weeks ago. It covered the wall and thrust out between
the fitted stones. Ripples of it draped the nearest tables,
growing new clusters on top of abandoned cameras and cheese
boards, all of it moving like fingers testing the water.
“Dude,” he said. As he watched, a rippling sheet of it
swept across the open doorway, clung for a moment and slid
back. “No one’s going to believe this.”
The smell suddenly intensified, reminding him of dead
shellfish at the beach. Edgar raised his hand to cover his
nose and saw purple muck on his fingers. It was on his bare
legs, inky streaks with the tang of iodine.
Edgar had to get out now. Shut down the air and water, tell
Magdalen. Get Finestra out of bed. The growth was
everywhere, glistening like seaweed. He grasped a table,
swung it out of his way and his hand sank into more muck.
As he hurried toward the door, another sheet swept across
the doorway, this time sticking to the frame, sealing the
exit. He reached out to punch an opening and the stuff
wrapped itself around him, in his eyes and onto his bare
skin. He tingled at the warmth and wetness as thousands of
tiny particles rubbed against him.
*
“Edgar? Edgar?”
He opened his eyes and saw the girl Jennifer leaning over
him, framed by a window filled with purple blossoms. She
smiled.
“Where am I?” He recognized the guest room of his mom’s
house. But he shouldn’t be here. He looked at his hands,
perfectly clean. That wasn’t right either.
“It’s almost lunch. Get up.” She kissed the tip of his nose
and bounced off the bed. She wore shorts and her legs were
long and brown. That’s right, he thought, it’s summer on
Earth.
He got up, looked at his baggy old shorts. “Do you mind?”
“So modest. I love that about you.”
“This isn’t right,” he began, putting on clothes he
remembered owning on Earth. “I was in Euler Cave just a
minute ago”
Already the memory was disappearing. In another second it
would be gone.
“That’s silly. You were right here a minute ago.”
Maybe she was right. It just felt real. He followed
Jennifer downstairs to the sun room where his mother was
laying out cups and napkins. “We thought you’d never wake
up,” mom said. “But then you’ve always been a good sleeper.
Jennifer, he was the most perfect, well-behaved baby.”
She went into the kitchen and Jennifer turned to Edgar,
laughing. “All moms are like that, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know. Mine is, I guess.” He felt a little muddled,
maybe it was too much sleep. The light from the French
doors was exceptionally bright and the plants outside
seemed more lush and green than they had—when? Yesterday?
He tried to focus on yesterday and came up with nothing.
There had been dinner, a movie. Beer.
“I drank too much last night, didn’t I?”
“You were cute.”
His mom bustled back into the room with pitchers of water.
Her hair, he noticed, was fixed up in elaborate waves and
swirls. “Here we are!”
When she sat down, Edgar realized she really did look a lot
like Magdalen, even down to the pink silk night shirt.
“Mom?”
“Drink while it’s warm, Edgar. You’ll feel much better.”
“Oh, yes,” said Jennifer, blowing a tiny switch of hair
which landed on her nose, among her freckles. “Absolutely
full of life.”
“Is something wrong, Edgar?”
He looked from Jennifer to his mom, who now wore Magdalen’s
cat-eye reading glasses.
“Am I dreaming?” He realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt,
though he’d put one on upstairs.
“Life,” said his mom, “is all around.”
“We’re full of life, Edgar,” Jennifer said. She reached
across the table and touched his hand. In her eyes, the
wide desolate landscape of the Moon seemed to rest briefly.
*
He heard pounding. “Edgar! Edgar, you thieving cheese head!
Wake up!”
Blearily, Edgar opened his eyes. Malden was hammering on
the windshield of a Rover. A Rover that he, Edgar, was
inside of. My god, just a moment ago, he’d been home on
Earth. Now where was he? Untangling
himself from the safety straps, he sat up. The Moon
Monument logo was on the dash. The same logo crested
Malden’s uniform, and as if he hadn’t gotten the point yet,
a huge version of it was emblazoned on the wall in front of
him.
He was still on the Moon, in the monument’s underground
transport level. The Rover was parked sideways next to a
big school shuttle from U.S. California. He unlocked the
door and Malden wrenched it open.
“How did I get here?” His last clear memory was of setting
the magnetic lock on Euler’s door. But there was something
about Jennifer and Magdalen, too.
“Isn’t it obvious? You stole my Rover!” She looked for
something to grab and finally settled for his hair, giving
it a fierce tug and hurling him out of the Rover. Malden
was taller and stronger than Edgar. “This is lunar
property! I could have you penalized for this.”
“You steal it all the time,” he replied, looking at his
hands. They were purple again.
“Yeah, but I work here.” She reached for her phone. “I have
to call Fin. He was absolutely sick about you, and that
Luna-Cheese woman has been calling every five minutes—Hon?
It’s me. I’ve got him. Yeah, okay.” She clicked off..
“Fin’s cleaning out one of the caves, so I’ll drive you
back. I can’t put you on local transport in your shorts.”
Edgar’s heart clutched. Fin was cleaning Euler. “Did you
actually talk to him? Are you sure it was Fin?”
“Of course I’m sure. Ick, don’t touch me.”
*
“What were you trying to do?” she asked as they bounced
along L5. On either side of the highway were empty
installations and living complexes, some stone, some steel,
all with drifts of silt blown into their doorways and
windows. “Were you trying to catch a ride to Earth?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to see the Moon Monument.”
Earth was just visible on the horizon. Across the distance,
oceans stirred on the blue planet, all the waters pulling
away from him. “Maybe I wanted to have a Moon experience.”
“What a tourist.”
“It’s full of life,” he said.
“The hell it is.” She turned on the audio feed and picked
up a wobbly Earth news broadcast. “The only life on the
Moon is us, Edgar. And we’re not doing so good.”
*
His Luna-phone started bleeping and Edgar sat up in his
bunk, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
“Edgar? Edgar, are you there?”
He switched on the visual and saw Magdalen. She was showing
a little more cleavage than Edgar liked to see on a woman
his mother’s age. “Where else would I go, Magdalen?”
“Good. Now that Euler is tip-top, we’re moving up the next
shipment. Launch is tomorrow morning.”
“I thought we had a couple of weeks.”
“Here at Luna-Cheese we don’t let opportunity pass us by,
Edgar.”
“Are you sending water?”
“The usual shipment. Do me a favor, Edgar, and salve
yourself. You’re a mess.” She clicked off.
Edgar stared at the company logo. The installation was
quiet. He got up and rooted around for his boots. On his
way to the caves he passed Finestra’s door, which was
vibrating off its hinges with his snores.
Euler was closed and the system pad was dark. He tried to
ignore the delicious, tingly feeling he got when he touched
the door handle and found it still slightly warm. Sinuous
cave was only a few steps away, and if Jennifer came back,
she’d go there to watch 232. Yet he felt a tingle as he
keyed off Euler’s mag-lock and opened the door.
Inside, Euler was perfectly clean. No sign of the moss.
Finestra had scrubbed the walls with acid and flushed
everything out into space. He’d set up tables and cheese
cams and even replaced a few soffit bulbs in the ceiling.
Edgar inhaled the unscented cool of raw stone. It looked
like any other cave in the installation. All it needed was
cheese.
“Edgar?” A green light pulsed in a nearby camera.
“Jennifer?” He scrambled around the table and peered into
the monitor. Nothing but shadows. “I need to—” He meant to
say talk to
you but it came out
wrong “—swim to you.”
“We need water,” she said. Her voice filled the cave,
independent of audio lines.
“You aren’t Jennifer.”
The green light throbbed in the heart of the camera as
though the Moon itself had hacked the system. “No.”
He’d known, deep down, that it wasn’t Jennifer he’d been
talking to in this cave. He’s just wanted it so much,
Jennifer, a real girl who liked the Moon and didn’t mind
his old shorts. Who thought he was a little cute. It would
have been so great.
He looked at the perfectly clean stone walls. He couldn’t
see the moss, but it was still living in here. He felt the
tingle at the back of his neck and wondered why he’d ever
thought it was unpleasant. “What do I do?”
“The cistern, Edgar.”
All he had to do was touch Euler’s keypad and open the
water menu. Route cistern control to Euler’s comm. Open the
floodgates. It would start as a trickle, then a gush, and
finally a torrent. It would fill the caves and overflow
into the halls, and burst through the magnetic locks and
sweep into the dust with a roar. From a hundred thousand
miles away everyone would see the Moon awash and spinning
in her storm.
He hesitated. Maybe one more look in Sinuous to see if
she’s come back? He shook off the thought and brought up
the environment menu. As he tapped the final key in the
sequence, it began: the first drops of rain.
Copyright
2009 by Kassandra Kelly