Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

And then she chuckled. Gyorgi had found the words now to speak to her, perhaps just in a whisper over the uplink. For her ears only. And Gyorgi remembered. He quoted to her, not the words that she had thought during the accident nor words of his own, but those of an American author, Edgar Allan Poe, from a story she’d shown him in Florida after he’d started his training with NASA.

The story had had to do with a balloonist who’d gone to the Moon.

When she began the transmission again, she already knew of the Lunar Module’s safe landing, of Gyorgi’s careful step out onto Tsiolkovsky’s smooth floor. She had seen, as if through his eyes, the other two follow: one man American, one a Frenchman. There would have been another American, too, in orbit in the C.M., had he not taken ill just before their launch window. She had been a last-minute substitute for him. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself still on Earth, standing outside in the dim, winter air to watch the nearly invisible Moon rise, where she would be, had it not been for Gyorgi’s powers of persuasion. And she thought that, in the imagination of another Frenchman, not far from where she and her husband had lifted off scarcely four days before, other lunar cosmonauts had launched themselves in a shell from a huge gun.

So many authors, and not just Americans and Frenchmen, had been enamoured of the Moon for centuries. Even the namesake of her husband’s landing site, their own Tsiolkovsky, had written among his scholarly papers a novel, Outside the Earth . Others, too—Oberth, Goddard, the Englishman H.G. Wells—wrote fact and fiction about lunar travel or travel to planets beyond the Moon. Or, in the case of Wells and another American, Lovecraft, of alien beings beyond the Moon, who, turning the premise on its head, came to Earth to do evil.

Horrors most stern and most appalling….

Tasha shuddered. As if Mankind couldn’t do evil enough itself.

She thought of Russia. Its people. Its sorrows. Its myths, also, though they, like the Western science-fictional myths filled with their own wonder, had helped bring her and her husband together.

And now he had landed, part of the first expedition to the Moon’s far side. The side that was dark when you could look up and see the Moon—always faced out to space. And light when you couldn’t, so that now, when the Moon was hidden from Earth, Gyorgi had light by which to explore.

“…We’re setting the cameras now on the crater floor.” This she brought up on the C.M. monitor to watch for herself, to compare the camera eye “reality” with such deeper truths as her mind’s eye might show her, again almost as if she might see through his eyes. So well did she knew her husband, by now, and his way with descriptions.

And she saw a graveyard….

Her mind snapped back to the Baykonur Cosmodrome. To a metal table and glasses of hot tea. “You,” Gyorgi had said, “you know the myths, too, then?”

“Yes,” she answered. “The Sun and the Moon. The stars their children. You, Cosmonaut-in-Training Sarimov, brought up in Krasnoyarsk”—they’d known each other that well by then—“are the image of Dazhbog, of the Sun.”

He chuckled. She gazed at his sun-bright hair—her own was pale-brown, at best its dim shadow—as he smiled and answered, “Then you, Mechanical Engineer Tasha, must be that strangely named beauty ‘Myesyats’. Named as a man, yet entirely a woman, the Goddess-Moon.” He chuckled again. “You know, they were married.”

She blushed. By then, they had slept together, but still…talk of marriage? She frowned as she answered, “True. They were married. But then he abandoned her.”

Gyorgi laughed. “Yes. But the following springtime…. “

And then, a week later, he did leave her, though not by his own choice. The KGB was still to be feared then and when, one evening, he didn’t show up with the others at the mess, she imagined the worst. She knew what he had been trying to do for her, to get her into the cosmonaut program. Fearing, to be sure, that as an engineer, she might at any time be re-assigned to some other location, something she didn’t wish to happen, either. But she knew, too, that, while Gyorgi had a way with his superiors, a way of usually wheedling successfully what he asked for, one could not push the system too far before it would push back.

And that was when she’d found out how much she really loved him.

“Houston, do you read? The cameras are working, but possibly, we’ve made a miscalculation. We’ve set down on the southern side of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, since that’s where the ground seemed the smoothest, but as a result, our landing site is in shadow. Perhaps in a few days, when the sun has shifted somewhat….”

She watched the pictures on the TV monitor and saw what Gyorgi meant. When they turned away from the mountain they were to explore, she could see the far crater wall, brilliant in sunlight, and the L.M. itself, where it sat on its landing struts, half-lit, half-shadowed.

But back toward the mountain, the strange, jagged peak that, so the scientists said, could only mean that Tsiolkovsky itself was an impact crater—and what an impact, the scar it left nearly three times as wide as the Earthside’s most prominent feature, Tycho!—back that way, all that the cameras could pick up was darkness.

She looked through Gyorgi’s eyes….

Darkness. A jumble. Shadow and darkness—the realm of Chernobog. And yet, in the darkness, this side of the mountain, what looked like small hillocks, yet pointed and craggy.

“The central peak’s children?” she whispered, half to herself. Realising, of course, that even if she were trying to contact him, Gyorgi, outside the L.M., couldn’t hear her.

She watched as if through his eyes, as if her sight, too, were confined by his helmet as he and the others peered into the darkness.

The hills were still far away from the L.M. and the men wouldn’t go to them until the next morning—Earth morning, that was, after they’d had another sleep period. Yet, they did look a little like gravestones.

Huge, sharp gravestones, patterned in rows. And between them—did she see what Gyorgi really saw?—what could almost be mist if the moon had an atmosphere.

Shadow and darkness. Her thoughts went back once more to that evening in Baykonur, when all her inquiries about Gyorgi had turned up nothing. She’d lain in bed in her room that night, claiming she felt ill, and tried to concentrate on Gyorgi.

She thought of the Sun and the Moon and their mythic love—the cause of the seasons. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Thought of their quarrels that, so the myths claimed, also gave birth to earthquakes. Dazhbog’s abandonment of his Moon-Bride every winter, but—here, she concentrated the hardest—his coming back each spring. And….

She joked about it afterward, saying it must have been the special sensitivity of her Russian woman’s soul. Or perhaps just stress. But she had seen it.

…the vision…

…white walls. An accident ward in a rural hospital outside of Baykonur, where Gyorgi had crashed his motorcycle. The doctors had not yet informed the officials—or, rather, as her vision widened, she realised they had told the Cosmodrome’s commandant, but, although she’d asked, he had not told her.

The shadow. The brightness. The earlier myths of primeval Man, of evil and goodness. Chernobog and Byelobog, gods of the Dark and Light. Light of truth, withheld even when she had asked….

Gyorgi had come back the following morning, little the worse for wear. And, of course, what she thought she had seen could have been a coincidence—she knew he drove too fast. She had even argued with him about it. But in the meantime, she’d made two decisions. The first was to officially ask for a transfer to the cosmonaut program, to become a cosmonaut-in-training. This, she knew, was what Gyorgi had wanted, but up to this moment, she had always held back.