Sinus Asperitatis
TIMELINE: AUGUST 15, 2017. SIX DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.
Always there was the moon.
Before humanity drew breath, the moon was there, shining in the sky, waxing and waning as it circled the world. It did not think. It did not dream. It was only the moon, endless and eternal.
With time, new creatures stirred and rose on the planet below. They saw the skies and were enchanted; they saw the seas and were afraid. Some saw the connections between the two, and they were lauded as wise ones and burned as witches, and still there was the moon. The moon, which watched but did not see, not yet, for no one had considered or suggested that it should.
Those new creatures saw the world so clearly and so strangely that it began to change itself to suit them. In tiny ways at first, but the world was very new; it had many tiny ways in which to change. Bit by bit they changed it through observance, until aspects of the universe itself began to take on the forms of these new beings, wearing their skins and seeing their reality through the eyes of the creatures, who called themselves “people.”
Those people looked up, and they saw the moon. They wondered what might live there, what glories and wonders the moon might conceal, and as they wondered, the universe changed again. Gods were born, gods who had just now come into being but had suddenly been there from the very beginning of everything, as reality adjusted to accommodate the always-present nature of things that hadn’t been only a moment before.
And for the first time, exactly as it had done every night since time began, the Moon rose.
There was little difference between the moon and the Moon, at least to the eye; they shone the same, hung in the sky the same, illuminated the night the same. They were one. But the Moon also walked the world; it lived the short, temporary lives of the people who had dreamt it into being, and while the moon was eternal, the Moon was temporary, waxing and waning from existence even as the moon waxed and waned from the sky.
Reality, self-organizing as ever, marched on, and the Moon split itself into innumerable pieces, each one with a body and mind of its own, and they continued, born and dying and mortal and eternal, all at the same time.
Always there is the Moon.
* * *
Aske is a goddess, and she walks down a tunnel filled with flashes of rainbow light against a background of dark so profound that it transcends darkness, becoming something else altogether. This is the everything, the glorious tunnel between worlds where she is called to do her duty as a divine reflection of the midnight sky.
Aske is also a nineteen-year-old girl from Minnesota, currently studying early childhood education in California. She had been considering colleges when the moon began speaking to her through her bedroom window, suggesting she consider Berkeley. Great things in Berkeley, the moon had said, before she had understood that she was the moon, the moon was her, and together, they were going to shine. Great things for you to learn and know and understand. Go to Berkeley.
Her grades had been good enough and her college fund had been healthy enough, and her desire to be away from her parents had been pronounced enough, and so off she’d gone, a suitcase in one hand and a transcript in the other, the moon whispering in the back of her thoughts like an imaginary friend. She’d worried at first about the growing clarity of that voice, wondering if she was losing her mind, and then one day the moon had become the Moon had become Aske, the goddess herself, sitting cross-legged on the edge of the dorm-room bed with her hands on her ankles, glowing with a faint silver-white light and smiling a hopeful, uneven smile.
“Your name is Eliza Benson, and my name is Aske, and you are nineteen years old, and I am without age, outside of time, and we are the same person, or we will be, if you allow us to be,” she’d said, voice earnest and soft and layered with an accent Eliza hadn’t known at the time. It’s not an accent that still walks the world; it has worn away by centuries of conquest and social unrest and change. “I am the moon goddess of the Sámi people, and you are a daughter of those same people, and I am here because we are meant to be combined.”
“Oh, no,” said Eliza. “I’m the daughter of a dentist and a school secretary from Minnesota.”
“Not in such immediate terms, silly,” said Aske, and laughed, and her laughter was like moonlight on the snow, shimmering and perfect, utterly unblemished by the world around her. “They were your ancestors, long and long ago. Not all who carry me are descended from my kind, but I prefer it when you are. It makes it easier for us to understand each other, if I embody a Moon whose tides your blood remembers.”
Eliza had stared at the girl for a while, then leaned over and poked her on the shoulder. Her skin had been cool and slightly yielding, like she was a well-built doll that just looked like a living woman. Aske had responded with a sigh and a sorrowful look, catching Eliza’s hand in her own.
“Let me tell you a story,” she’d said.
And Eliza, who was studying early childhood education for a reason, had settled on the bed, willing to listen to this impossible girl in this impossible situation as she said more impossible things. Somatic satiation of the soul is a thing, after all; once a concept has been repeated a sufficient number of times, it becomes easier to accept, to incorporate, to stop being seen as anything out of the ordinary. When Aske had first appeared on the bed, Eliza very nearly panicked. Now, after relatively little time, she was accepting the presence of a glowing girl who claimed to be the moon with surprising ease.
Even then, something about it had felt right. And the voice of the girl in front of her had been so similar to the voice that had been speaking inside her head that it seemed almost easier to just sit back and listen.
Aske had nodded as she watched her, and said, “A very, very, very long time ago, the world began. It was full of all manner of things, and it needed all manner of forces if it was going to operate properly and not collapse in on itself in a tangle of contradictions. Those forces worked very hard to do their jobs, but they didn’t know they were doing jobs; they didn’t know anything, because they weren’t people. Nothing was people yet. It was only the world, and the unthinking advance of life and time and evolution.
“But then, bit by bit, some of the things that lived in the world got to be so good at living that they started to look at their environment and wonder things about it. They started to become people. Not just humans, although humans didn’t have much going for them beyond being able to wonder things—elephants were people, too, and dolphins, and a bunch of other species. It was a race no one realized they were running, and everyone was racing for the first big prize that no one knew existed: they were running for the right to tell the universe what to be.”
Eliza had blinked without interrupting, trying to understand the story unspooling in front of her, trying to recognize why it felt so right. It was like she was listening to a report on a topic she’d been studying extensively for her entire life, even though she’d never heard any of this before.
“Humans got there first. They started telling each other stories, fables where the moon was a maiden crossing the sky in a coracle boat, or the winter was a cruel king who killed the crops in the fields because he couldn’t be with his one true love, the queen of the summer. They set the universe in terms they could understand, and the universe was listening, the whole time. The universe was learning what they wanted it to be.
“No one knows, not even the gods ourselves, which idea was the first one to find fertile soil. But one day, one of those forces the universe needed to contain if it wanted to keep working decided it was going to put on a fancy face and a pair of legs and go walking around the world. And it found it worked better that way. Oh, it was limited, because humans are always limited when you compare them to dispassionate cosmic forces, but it was limited in a way that helped it do its job. It understood itself, and in understanding itself, it could be more than itself. Do you understand?”
Eliza both did and didn’t, and so she had shrugged, trying to express complexity in silence. Aske had only smiled in response, and then gone back to her story.
“Some of the forces were so big, so essential, that they appeared more than once. There’s not just one Winter in the world, not just one Ocean. They began curating vessels they could inhabit, began watching the humans who spoke of them to see which ones might have the right seeds, the right sympathies, to carry them through their lives. And bit by bit, they built a system. Now sometimes, when it’s time for a force to seek embodiment, they can go to those people and ask them whether they’re willing to be something more than mortal.”
And with that, Eliza had finally, truly begun to understand. She was a woman, and a student, and a vessel, and Aske was the thing she had been missing for her entire life. That was when she had held her hand out to Aske, and Aske had taken it, laughing again, and then Eliza had been alone but not alone, Aske still laughing in the back of her head, the air around her glittering silver-white with the divinity that poured off of her own skin, lighting up her suddenly shared room.
(The other gods—and there are so many other gods, moon gods from all over the world, and the number in Berkeley with her isn’t even a fragment of the greater pantheon, oh, no. Even if it were, gods are like seasons: they manifest dozens of times at once, putting the weight of themselves into the world. Aske is a relatively minor goddess in the modern pantheon, and she exists dozens of times right now. Eliza is only the newest. Eliza hopes to meet those other Askes someday. She thinks they would be good friends. But. The other gods call the process of manifesting divinity into the real world “stepping up,” meaning their godly sides step up while their human sides step back, allowing the divine to take the stage. When she lets Aske move to the front of their shared awareness, it’s like she’s watching everything from the other side of a wall, not quite in control of herself. She never really liked drinking in high school. Now she wishes she’d done it more, because it’s the best comparison she has for the process of standing back and letting a god control her body.)
So Aske is a goddess and Aske is Eliza and Eliza is a goddess, and the both of them are also the one of them, and that one is traveling along the rainbow-streaked corridor that leads them through the everything, away from their own private window onto the Impossible City. The City is something out of a children’s book, quite literally, but it’s also real, it’s real, it’s the most real thing Eliza-who-is-Aske has ever seen, and the first time she looked at it, she started crying, because it was so beautiful that it made her understand that she’d never seen beauty before, not once in her whole entire life.
Chang’e, who isn’t the senior or most powerful goddess in Berkeley—that honor goes to Diana, who’s been doing this so long she’s a professor, with tenure, teaching art classes; Eliza is planning to take a class with her next semester—but is the goddess who seems to handle most of the administrative side of things, says it’s like that for everyone the first time they see the City. They’re so stunned by the proof that humans really do shape the universe that it takes their breath away.
(Eliza was surprised, at first, to realize that gods had paperwork, had to keep records and set schedules and generally take all the magic out of divinity. Her surprise faded quickly when she remembered that Aske’s initial explanation had included telling her how the universe sought out humanity as an organizational force; maybe there were pure gods somewhere in the actual heavens, divinities who didn’t spend half their time as ordinary mortals, but if so, they were something she would never need to understand. The members of her pantheon are gods. They’re also people, and people need paperwork.)
She has made her tour across the sky of the Impossible City, seeing such wonders and such marvels that she feels warm and satiated with the memory of it all, saturated with beauty. It will be weeks before she has access to the everything again, weeks before it’s her turn to walk through the gate into the welcoming abyss, and so she doesn’t hurry toward the gate. She allows herself to dawdle, to take her time.
She’s still walking through the rainbow brilliance of the night she’s had when something strikes the back of her head, hard enough that she feels bone giving way like the bark on a tree, feels skin splitting, feels the first hot wetness of blood working its way into her hair. She doesn’t feel much more than that. She’s already falling, tumbling toward the ground that suddenly seems so very, terribly, infinitely far away.
She isn’t dead yet when hands grip her under the arms, dragging her deeper back along the rainbow road, back toward the window that looks out upon—
The City! is her last, despairing thought before consciousness winks out like an extinguished candle, leaving her to plummet down into a darkness where there are no rainbows, no gods, nothing but the infinite and echoing nothing that waits on the other side of the divine.
And there, in the far distance, a flicker of light, a lure for those beyond luring, an enticement for those who are beyond action, beyond agency, lost in the clouds that gather between one world and the next. She is no longer aware, but like a flower turning toward the sun, her face turns toward the light and there, inside and beyond it:
The City the City the City the City …
And she is no more.
Mare Crisium
TIMELINE: AUGUST 17, 2017. FOUR DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.
Máni isn’t back yet.
That’s not entirely unusual: Máni isn’t the most dependable god in the pantheon, never has been, and this latest incarnation is even more inclined than the last to lingering in the everything beyond the gate when it’s his turn to shine. Chang’e, who was set to meet him upon his return, can’t help thinking she’ll be relieved when he retires, and hopes his general dislike of fruits and vegetables will hasten that retirement along. She feels a little guilty for thinking that way—they’re supposed to be a pantheon, a team, and she doesn’t want to be the villain of the piece—but he doesn’t take his duties as seriously as he’s supposed to, doesn’t seem to really care about their sacred task, and without it, they might have faded the way so many other incarnations have.
She shouldn’t judge. It’s not like she was here in time for moonrise, when she should have escorted him to the gate with all proper pomp and circumstance. But she’d been distracted with a translation paper, and time had slipped away from her. She’d grabbed her things and raced for the gate, half-convinced she’d get there to either find him standing impatiently outside, or worse, to find Diana waiting to tell her that due to her negligence, the City had been forced to find another way, and their services were no longer needed. That would be the end of them all, if it were ever to come to pass.
After all, gods aren’t natural forces, not like Summer and Winter; they’re fractured reflections of natural forces. They don’t necessarily endure. The ones who perform an essential service get to stick around, vestigial remainders of a time when belief had been bigger and easier, a time before the alchemists began tying everything down to a single system of understanding, turning people into weapons to wield against anything that wasn’t the reality they wanted to control. The gods without an essential service …
Gods can be forgotten. Seasons can’t. Oceans can’t. But gods … gods are only ever here to go.
Maybe once there had been a true incarnation of the Moon, just one, singular and serene. But much as the Summer and Winter appear on every continent of the world, distinct from one another, shaped by the climate and conditions of the land they serve, the moon shines down everywhere, and people look up at it everywhere, and everywhere, those people looked at that moon and formed their own ideas about what it represented. Some of them saw men and some of them saw monsters and a surprising number of them saw rabbits. Incarnations are born from belief in the beginning and inertia in the end, and all over the world, the Moon fractured into smaller shards of itself, faces, and where there’s a face, there will be someone to wear it.
And everywhere there were people, the moon continued to shine. The moon, celestial body that she was, didn’t care how many little incarnations spoke for her, how many people were empowered in her name. She only needed to shine.
In the beginning, all the shards of the Moon served their own pantheons, walked among the people who truly believed in them. Chang’e would never have known Máni in those days, would never have been forced to deal with his casual refusal to take his job seriously. She would have been a part of the celestial bureaucracy, organized and occupied and, quite probably, completely miserable. She may not like how lackadaisical Máni is about things, but she doesn’t like to be micromanaged; she’s happier here.
But time passes, and gods fall out of fashion. Oh, everyone remembers the Zeuses and the Odins, but she can’t remember the last time she heard T’ou-Shen Niang-Niang invoked outside of a scholastic paper. Shitala has greater staying power, having diversified her portfolio. That didn’t save her cognates. So far as Chang’e knows, only the lunar gods still have a fully intact company, a pantheon made up of refugees from dozens of others, and it’s all because they have a job that transcends human belief, keeping the universe wedded to the idea of them as it isn’t necessarily wedded to everything that calls itself divine.
Which Máni is screwing up.
Until he shows up for the handoff, she’s stuck in her divine form, unable to step down without violating propriety, meaning she’s the goddess of the moon and immortality and peach harvests before she’s a linguistics major, and that’s going to fuck her day eleven ways from Sunday if she doesn’t get out of here soon. She’s supposed to be meeting with her advisor in a little over three hours, and since her advisor doesn’t really understand why she refuses to take classes with the best linguist in the world—most linguistics majors at Berkeley are here for Professor Middleton at this point, and while she can’t blame them, she wants to attract his attention about as much as she wants a bad case of pubic lice—that’s not going to be a fun meeting.
Copyright © 2024 by Seanan McGuire
