I’d like to go to the moon because—
Yes. Why exactly would you wish to travel to the moon, especially in your condition?
If I could just see what’s going on up there right now—
That’s different. We do have a channel, to communicate with our suppliers. You’d be satisfied to observe it from the viewing room?
Have you been to the moon?
Oh, I’ve never missed a day of work. I’m much like your late father in that respect…
You knew him?
A fine man. One of the best.
Could I see him?
He’s gone.
Where did he go?
Where you’re going.
Will I see him then?
He’s considerably farther away than the moon.
Oh.
Now, as I mentioned, we do have a viewing room. Whom would you like to see?
Victoria.
Of course. A pretty name, isn’t it?
Yes—
You have very good taste, if I may say so, to feel as you do toward that lovely young woman. In her life she was, how shall I say, unappreciated—
But she—
Yes, yes, that’s right. This way. Now, when you open the door, it will seem quite dark. Close the door behind you and wait for your eyes to adjust. Remember also that from here to the moon is a good light-second or two, as we both know from our college days. Just take your time. I’ll be in my office up front.
Thank you, Mr. Murmuracki.
Within seconds he had become one of the elect who comprehend that the moonglare is caused by a certain pearlescent cloud-lid pressed tight over the Mountains of the Moon, whose fragile purple teeth and angles become black by contrast with this painful cloud and with the steep white bow of snow beneath; something about these entities makes for an awful and dangerous dazzlement.
Isaac was sitting alone and moody by the shore of a high cold lunar lake whose surface happened to be, in horrible contrast to Isaac himself, alive with earth-tides; he was picking moonflowers and dissecting them into nothing, ignoring Victoria, who hovered seductively at his shoulder, festively clad in her flesh; the breeze kept whipping her long blonde hair in Isaac’s face; sometimes a strand of it flicked into his eyesocket, and then without looking up he brushed it away with his wristbone, meanwhile ruining more and more moonflowers, whose petals flew up like fireflies toward the lunar mountains. The roar of the lake-waves against the dun and cinder-dark moon rocks was so loud that whatever those two might have been saying to each other, if anything, could not be overheard; but presently Victoria began to ascend away, and as she cast one look over her shoulder, my neighbor who watched discovered her face sparkling with tears. Isaac never looked up. Pitying her, this sad watcher, whom both of them had rejected, leaped up to call to her; he thought merely to console her; he wasn’t selfishly desirous! At this, Isaac gangled himself upright, a tall skeleton no longer in possession of all his metacarpii (no doubt he rambled hard here on the moon), turned round, waved and grinned at his former friend, who waved back neutrally, neither disliking nor blaming him but disinclined to be won over and re-abandoned (when he was young, he, like Isaac, had tried his best to make everyone love him, until failures taught him how to strengthen himself with the magic spell called no); whereas Victoria, flitting and hesitating, finally alit upon the water, at arm’s length from the shore, wiped her eyes upon her fairskinned arm, and said: Hi.
Hello, he said. I was just—
I don’t want to talk about it.
All right, he replied, mildly sorry that he could not help her. A moon-bird with a pearlescent beak rushed silently between them. He turned away as she began to strip, and Isaac swung the telescopic barrels of his eyesockets toward her. He left them then, approving of them both, wondering whether Victoria would succeed, in which case Isaac would certainly break her much-broken heart: all in a day’s work.
Far away across the milky moon-lake, which widened and narrowed like a woman’s body, there was a rolling rise of moon-alders and laval outcroppings, and beyond this grew many blackish-purple mountains of fantastic height, sharpness and fragility, like broken glass upended on narrow points, flaring out into double-bladed wings, and then terminating (where the clouds revealed it) in needles; and because he was on the moon, and therefore already partially of this place, he found himself able to speed as rapidly as a water-bird, if not as gracefully as his Victoria, over the waves and then up that lava-pored tree-swale and up a very steep yet rounded canyon to a glacier amphitheater amidst the highest peaks; and there, as he had suspected and hoped, walked Luke, quite steadily and still undecomposed; while at his shoulder now flew that naughty, never satisfied Victoria, so good at making herself and others unhappy, whispering, giggling, touching herself; just then she was a skeleton and did not seem to know it — or perhaps she had tried everything else and hoped to tempt Luke through this more advanced state of undress. Luke trudged on. Why didn’t he fly like her? Well, he hated to cut corners. When she swirled down before him, seeking to clasp him in her bony arms, he pushed her away. She fell to the ground, perhaps on purpose, then leaped into the sky and streaked upward, leaving behind her a glowing trail of anger which condensed and fell to the snow as reddish-brown crystals which in turn sublimed into nothing.
Giving Luke awhile to recover from the irritation which Victoria must have caused, he presently overtook him, and called out. Luke uttered his name with cheerful surprise, and so he flew down to visit his friend.
How are you getting on?
Oh, not bad, said Luke. There’s a million-year hike I plan to take, if I last that long, which I probably won’t. What’s going on?
Happily and excitedly he began to tell Luke all about himself. So often in their lives he had talked and talked, and Luke had patiently listened. At intervals Luke had called upon him in distress; but mostly it had gone the other way, and it was still like that. He requested advice, and Luke said: Well. I can tell you what I’d try not to do, not that I’m very good at doing what I’m supposed to. You’ve collected a lot of stuff in your life. Why not get rid of it?
I’m trying to phase it out in stages, he replied.
I’d say that’s very sane.
How are you feeling? he asked again.
I have good days and bad days. Being dead isn’t all that great, but it’s not terrible. I try to appreciate what I can, like the earthlight on the snow over there. Where I’m heading there should be much more snow.
Then the wind began to hiss, whistle and shriek. Luke lowered his head, walking steadily into it.
The watcher hovered behind, as he had in life, perceiving now how steep and shadowed was that place between the rock-teeth. Here was he and there was Luke, with death snow-shadowed between them. There was Luke, going up into the blue sky of space. When the dying man departed the viewing room, he felt slightly ashamed that on his face Mr. Murmuracki could probably discern that loneliness, as if he had sat too long by the shore of that writhing lunar lake, while everyone else went about the business of living or being dead; he thought: Oh, no, to be lonely forever! and a high cold wind rushed down from the Mountains of the Moon.
When he found the little red book in which he had written his morbid poems, he felt revulsion and resistance. It was this object which caused Victoria to leave him. His final lover’s letter to her was enclosed, carefully and viciously marked up by her. Setting it aside, he took the red book back into his hand. Pulling open the cover with his thumb was more unpleasant than it would have been to lever the slab off Victoria’s grave. But he did it. The poems, of course, were very badly written, in an unhappy seventeen-year-old’s unaware imitation of the Decadent manner. But it was worse than that — what had he been thinking? They described someone who looked like her, yet was dead and rotten. It was bad enough that he had written them; but why had he sent them to her? What had he supposed would happen? Now for a moment he excavated the grave of that pallid, skinny seventeen-year-old boy who had understood neither Victoria nor himself. The boy stared up at him. A beetle crawled across his spectacles. His desire to ask the boy anything fell away, for the boy knew nothing. He replaced the slab. Asking himself how he would feel if some woman wrote him poems like these, he answered: I would think her very sick. I would fear she meant me harm. I would get away from her — far away, forever.