Work Text:
It doesn’t happen all at once. The colors of the moon never do, the slow shifting of greens and browns across the luminous face. Spring is a hesitant thing. The early lunar year is characterized by a blush of pale green, faint as a held breath, for weeks before the color blooms vivid across the silvery land. Maena has been watching every night for the moon to bloom, and tonight the moon’s shy spring rewards her. She watches the clouds swirl over the silvery green and imagines she can hear the rainfall.
Maena has poured over the maps in the library. They are all old, the pages yellowing, the names archaic. She knows that the brightness gleaming on the edge of the moon’s face is the Temaenian Sea, with the wide bay sweeping inland. On the shores of this bay the green comes first, and brightest. It is the land called Ans Hos, the Garden of the Mind. Within this garden lies the city. The old maps call it Annares Town, but she knows it has outgrown that name like a seed splitting its husk. She wonders what they call it now, the dreamers, the anarchists.
When the first ships left, she did not understand the dream that drove them. She was a round-faced child of eight years, silvery hair still soft on her cheeks, eyes bright with moonlight. The pictures of the rockets on the front page of the paper promised only adventure, and she had tugged her mother’s sleeve begging to join them. There was still space. There was still time. Her father had frowned.
Year by year she has sat on the narrow balcony and watched Ans Hos grow greener every spring. It is a hesitant thing, the settlement of the moon, a new society opening its first bright leaves. The spaceships are still leaving and arriving. No one wants to talk about it – not her parents or her teachers at school. It has not been in the newspapers since the first ships left. It seems to Maena that her planet is turning its back on the moon, turning in shame or disgrace, as though afraid to look. Her father’s friends say, “It’s a shame to see so many fools,” and, “A plan like that will never work,” and, “The poor bastards will all starve,” quietly to each other over drinks. Sometimes she sits at the top of the stairs in the dark, when she should be in bed, listening for any news. There is very little. Only their quiet, morbid certainty that the moon will never flower.
It will be years before Maena thinks to wonder if they were only reassuring themselves, reassuring each other, that they made the right choice in keeping their meager lot on Urras. It will be after she learns, from teachers speaking in dour tones, what foolish things Odo promised. She will decide her father must have been right in his bitter doubt. It will be after she and her classmates, drawn by the forbidden subject, debate what little they know of government and economy with the fierce certain opinions of half-understanding. She will decide that the Odonians are noble but idealistic, and that their dream is beautiful and doomed. Yet each spring she will see the moon grow richer green than ever before, and she will be a little less sure.
Maena is sixteen now, her face no longer round, her head painstakingly shaven, the moon still bright in her eyes. Every day her mother comes home and sits heavily in the armchair, smelling of the fierce soap she uses to scrub a stranger’s floors. Maena will join her, soon. She has only one more year of school left before the boys continue on without her. Tonight her mother brought her along to an evening job, not for the first time. Maena sits crosslegged on the little balcony, finishing her schoolwork by moonlight. The sting the soap leaves on her hands is not familiar, yet. On a blank page she sketches the phases of the moon. Tonight it is gibbous and golden, low above the horizon, so it is pierced by the jagged spires of the city skyline. She has so many questions. What makes the phases of the moon? Why does it shift from gold to silver as it rises? Is Urras as beautiful, as bright and pale in the sky, from the shores of the moon’s shining sea?
The only maps in the library are the same maps she memorized years ago. The books are the same faded books dryly accounting the first moon landings, the barren mining town, before Annares was a place anyone called home. It seems sometimes that the whole of Urras is pretending that the sister planet is still just a moon, and not anyone’s world.
There is one small book with glossy pages, written for children, from half a century ago. It speaks of the moon landings as a new and brilliant thing, before the wonder faded. Maena reads it eagerly, because for her, the wonder never has. Again and again she has pulled it from the shelf and poured over the photographs. Six men standing in a field of silvery grass, their hair tousled by the wind of another world. The mountains, stark and sheer like nothing Urras has ever given birth to. A cove of the southern ocean, the water achingly blue, the shallows streaked with unfamiliar fish. The moon is drier and fiercer than she once imagined. Even at midday, the book says, the sky never brightens beyond a sharp violet. The clean lines of the mountains against that sky make her throat ache with longing.
Years later, she will find a battered copy of the glossy little book in a half-price bin in a bookstore. She will spend a handful of precious coins on it, and never once regret the night she spends hungry because of it. It will sit on the wooden shelf above the bed in an apartment room too cheap to have a balcony, so when she returns late with her hands stinging of soap she will sit below the little window to pour over its pages.
The first boy she takes to her bed will smile at her when he sees the book. He will touch her face and call her moon-mad, Moongirl, dreamer. She will tell him that the ships still leave, carrying dreamers, and he’ll frown. He’ll tell her that the anarchists are noble but idealistic, and it will all fall to ruin. She’ll agree, even though her throat aches, even though the moon grows greener every spring.
In a different room, one with a balcony, she’ll fall in love with her roommate. They will sit on the balcony shoulder-to-shoulder, naming the faint scratches of the moon’s mountain ranges. They will run out of names on the map and invent their own, pretending they are speaking the solemn language the anarchists made. Maena will whisper that on the moon, they could be lovers beyond these four walls. The other girl will smile at her and call her Moongirl, dreamer. The ships still leave, but in spring the moon will be dull and yellow, with no rainclouds moving across the face. People will look up at it and shake their heads, and Maena will ache for lost dreams.
When Maena is twenty-four, the drought on the moon will pass. The pale held breath of spring will bloom suddenly green across the Ans Hos, and the ache in her throat will tell her that she does not care about the fragility of dreams. She will have lost plenty of her own, already. She will have fallen in and out of love, she will have grown used to the sting of soap on her hands. This will be the year she searches the small bookstores of the city until she finds Odo’s Analogy tucked on a back shelf. The book is not forbidden, but it may as well be. She will tuck it into her jacket and hurry home, and when she reads it by moonlight the words will burn the ache in her chest into a certainty.
She will not tell her father of her plan, not until it is too late for him to stop her. But she will go to her mother on a night when he is not home.
“There are still floors to scrub on Annares,” her mother will say, with the heavy certainty of someone who resigned herself to her choice years ago. “It is a harsh planet, Maena, and it will be hard to live there. There is so much work to be done.”
“There will always be floors to scrub,” Maena will tell her. The sharp smell of soap long ago became the smell of home. “But on Annares, I will be the one to walk on them. I will make my own way.”
It will be summer when she goes to Odonian Resettlement Building downtown and braves the bitter glares of the Ioti government officials to receive the stack of forms she must file. It will be spring again by the time they are processed. A year later she will board a hulking silver ship, with nothing in her hands but moonlight. Her world will fall away beneath her.
But none of this has happened yet. Tonight, Maena is sixteen years old, and her hands hurt, and she knows morning will come too soon. She has so many questions. Why do we live the way we do, with the rich and the poor, the ones who clean the floor and the ones who walk on it?
Could it really be different?
How do you learn to farm a new world, to make it greener every spring, to start a new life?