Chapter 1. Farewell My Child
Restless you are.
For billions years of light around there's only me who can boast of this ill luck. Could I imagine this so long ago when I run a fever from raving, roaring volcanoes, when the sky was black and red, and magma inside was exploding with pain? And there was nothing but smoke and fire, and heavy plates were colliding, as if arguing which of them would bring more destruction; but ranges of mountains were growing on the places of these collisions, growing only to be decayed by winds afterwards.
That was the agony of birth.
The beginning of the end took place on a serene, insensate day, when the surface of a warm lake went fretty, and the next moment, some tiny creature, looking round timidly, climbed onto a heated rubble. Later, it was followed by the others.
They were gathering strength, growing larger, and soon, they were already plucking the leaves from the highest trees. And then, one creature jumped down another one's throat. Something scarlet spluttered over the dusty ground.
Something rumbled inside a seemingly sleeping mountain. If it rumbled stronger; if I fell into icy slumbers for one thousand years longer; if a stone fragment that smacked into me was just a bit larger – and life would vanish, and there would be evening, and there would be morning – the zero day.
But you didn't vanish. You were taking various shapes, quainter and quainter, you were spawning, living unbearably short lives – but still clinging to them, and seeking simple treasures in soil. Until someday, one of you, for no apparent reason, looked up – looked there where the stream gravels of strange worlds were twinkling in the dusk.
The birth of mind. And I am its cradle.
Now, you've become my part, considerable and integral. You change yourselves, you change everything around, creating sometimes, but destroying far more often. One day, you will leave me alone, but then I will fall into deadly slumbers myself. I seem too crowded; too boring; I am not enough. It's not enough to leave the sea and to build the cities – and then, one of you rushes into the skies.
At the height of one hundred kilometers from the surface, my realms end.
There is silence.
There is void.
There is death…
You are not going to realize this.
Look at me. Remember me the way I seem from there – a shining blue world still where this intelligent, hazardous life lingers one.
The higher you rise, the more wonderful you find the place quitted. And it is unbearably beautiful if you are leaving it forever.
I feel each and every one but you are no more among them.
Now you are on your own.
Don't take good care. It won't help.
Farewell my child.
Chapter 2. Selena the Fair
Bastards. Your world is not enough. Now you came for me.
Appeared from nowhere, rising swarms of dust that was lying here still back then when your first ancestor was not even born. Planted a flag on a yonder hill and at the same moment announced me your property. And started jumping on surface merrily, making jokes of the importance of your first steps.
Not that you were so much wrong: every such step was, in fact, a giant leap.
Into the abyss.
I knew that you would return. Knew that these rovers were furrowing my surface not for nothing, although their cautious expeditions to my mountains might look rather innocent.
Time passed – years for you, a moment for me, - and now you are back, biting into me, painstakingly and obdurately. Damned treasure seekers. A drilling tool immerses into the rock for one meter – and this is million times worse that the sudden impact of meteor. No, these flying stones never unbalance me. Coincidentally, that I have nothing to stop them – and they have nothing else to fall on; nobody's guilty.
And you act in a different way, purposefully and composedly. You flew over here to plunder. You are going to exhaust your own planet in a little while but you want to live more, to go forward, leaving miles of scorched territories behind. Mining today – and tomorrow when your numerous structures keep growing on my areas.
One of you tumbled to an idea that these cities should spread not upwards but to the deep.
Dash into the sky in order to go below ground afterwards – ain't that an irony?
Life is so fragile. Can you feel? You don't belong here.
You impersonate instability, momentariness, hollowness. Stain my dark-grey monochrome with the squealing notes of scarlet. And the life walks away, leaving the aftertaste of iron. And nothing will help; neither the artificial sleep, nor the shelter walls, nor the ignis fatuus for coming back home.
Soon, my dark half will become your grave. And your forsaken world can't be even seen from this side.
The number of my craters will be increasing. Not mutilating me but adorning.
And there are just a couple of wrinkles left for you.
Human, you are the foreignness for me. But it is you who punishes yourself. And I am just erasing you from my history.
And there is evening, and there is morning. The day number one thousand and ninety-five.
Chapter 3. A Swimmer in the Airless Ocean
But you rode out, after all. You left so many copies of you on the hostile satellite of a planet which was familiar to you only from the photographs.
I am not hostile. I don't care.
Germ of life, supernova flare, collision of two celestial bodies – all of these eventualities repeatedly multiplied by other eventualities. A game of probabilities – no more, no less.
A tiny shuttle is flying over the thoroughly calculated trajectory. There are no illuminators in this shuttle. No communication. No one knows whether you're alive or dead.
Therefore, you are free to be both at the same time.
72 hours of flight. 72 hours of absolute loneliness. Remember them as the only time interval in your artificial life when you are alone.
And still, one third of it is spent on sleep.
Everything's borrowed in you, everything's copied, up to the last molecule. Even the dreams don't belong to you.
Sleep is a model of death.
And vacuum is around. There is nothing scary about darkness if it is empty. But there's darkness of different kind – that darkness where you notice some movement; somebody is stirring there, comes closer just for a moment, sufficient for you to recognize your own face; and this second you is already going away, deeper and deeper into the dusk; and, even though you have agreed upon everything back there, on the Moon – he stays, and you fly away with an important mission – you're still yelling to him: don't go! And he is just smiling – with his lips no blood-stained – to you? No...
Awakening from a nightmare is akin to birth – both events are accompanied by a scream.
When you open the airlock, the Earth will be outside.
The biggest challenge is ahead.
And there was night, but now, it will be day.
The first day.
Catena Bell is a chain of 6 craters on the far side of the Moon named after the astronaut Sam Bell. The name was approved by the International Astronomical Union on November 5, 2036.