Starchild
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Chapter Seventeen: Green Glass
Eirika missed the first words spoken by a human standing upon the lunar surface; she was too busy struggling with the backpack she would need to survive out there in Luna's airless environment. When she, in turn, descended the Heron's ladder to set a bootprint in the fine powder that made their landing site, she wasted no time in broadcasting her own first statement from this new territory.
"May we see this scarred world as a place of infinite possibility."
Perhaps it was, but what Eirika's eyes took in was a landscape more stark than the most forbidding deserts of Magvel. Like her first glimpse of Luna's far side, that shattered vista of craters upon craters, the Bay of Rainbows was compelling in its desolation.
"Look at all these beautiful rocks," she added, hoping that Professor Saleh was listening in. "I think they have a story for us."
And they went to work. Eirika planted the flag of the United Free Nations in the lunar dust, then Marth set down a plaque commemorating the mission, its date of arrival, and the peaceful intentions of humans. They had a few more items to leave upon Luna and had just set down a pair of medallions, one to commemorate Pilot 004 and another for Pilot 010, when ground control announced that Premier Hardin was on the line. Eirika straightened up as quickly as she dared and stood at attention while Marth handled the call; she only got a "Yes, sir" in to the premier before the call ended. And then it was back to their checklists of tasks, for every second counted.
Work fast, but not too fast- they'd use air too rapidly if they weren't careful. Marth had already scooped up a number of geological "contingency samples" that would have to suffice for Professor Saleh and the rest if some emergency forced them to leave ahead of schedule. But they unfolded the rover and all its functions checked out, and so Eirika and Marth embarked upon their planned excursion, rolling through the Bay of Rainbows at a steady nine miles per hour. Only then, in the passenger seat... did Eirika have time to think for a moment about what they were actually doing.
The fine dark dust, the texture of talcum powder, that coated the white surface of her gloves was the dust of Luna. That same dust sprayed out in improbable arcs from their rover wheels; Luna had no air to impede its fall. No air, and only a fraction of Terra's gravity. The fall of one mote of dust was a new experience. Eirika relayed all this to the ground as eloquently as she could, as Marth focused on navigating the rover on their carefully plotted course to the section of the Bay of Rainbows that was said to hold the most geologic interest.
A flash of green caught Eirika's eye- color, here on the grayscale moon of that small blue world somewhere above them? She asked for permission to stop and collect it, and the ground crew agreed easily. Marth stopped the rover; Eirika stepped carefully down from the rover seat and, using her claw-armed collection tool, plucked the shining bit of green from Luna's dark dust. It was glass- glass in the geologic sense of being amorphous fused silica. It bore a marked resemblance to the pale green lumps left in the wake of a nuclear test. Eirika offered up the tentative explanation that it was the memento of a meteor strike, and the geologists sitting back on Luna seemed to accept this. She wished Saleh might break in, assuming he was on this shift. The professor might have some insight into this odd find.
She saw more than a few glistening specks of green in the dust as the rover carried them toward the mountains that rimmed the Bay of Rainbows. On airless Luna, the distant horizon appeared as sharply defined as near objects; Eirika thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, causing her to see a familiar cityscape in the jagged piles of rock- a cluster of domed buildings surrounding a high tapering tower. Yet, as they grew closer, the "skyline" didn't resolve into anything that seemed natural; the domes did not become volcanic cinder cones, the central tower did not become some sort of lunar butte. And the dust beneath the rover wheels gave way to a distinct path of crushed stone.
"How are you, Eirika? Eirika?"
Heavens forgive her, she had almost forgotten about Roy. Poor Roy, up there all alone in the Falcon III, quite literally the loneliest specimen of humanity at that moment. He sounded so earnestly normal in that moment that it jarred Eirika.
"I could tell you, Roy, but I don't think I have the words."
Roy took this as an indication that they were having a fine time down there on Luna. Eirika looked up, in case she might see the shimmer of the Falcon capsule as it passed by, but she saw nothing.
"Next time you come by, Roy, let me know what this place looks like from the air. I mean, from orbit."
No air, she reminded herself. No wind. No trees or flowers. No rushing water. No life. But there was this city... nonetheless. Five-sided fingers of basalt formed great arches over the path, almost like the ribcage of some tremendous beast. Triumphal arches, welcoming the heroes of some alien race back to the capital?
Eirika, operating on pilot's intuition, continued to relay messages that were truthful but not entirely... accurate. Marth for his own part had nothing of note to say until they reached the base of the great central tower, at which point he announced that they were through driving for a while. Then, Eirika heard the three-tone beep in her headset that indicated a private transmission.
"We're not the first here," she said, almost afraid to speak those momentous words. How private was private, anyway?
"We're the first humans on Luna," Marth said, remarkably unmoved by this entire revelation.
"Is there anyone... here?" Eirika craned her head as far back as she dared as she took in the vista of this massive tower.
"No. Not for eleven hundred years." He sounded so certain of this, as certain as he was of the equations in their calculus lessons.
Eirika wondered, for a moment, why she wasn't afraid. Had the entire experience, from the landing onward, simply been more than one human mind and body might process and still retain the ability for fear, for joy? Or was this all some surreal dream, born of uncomfortable sleep in the Heron lander?
Or were the ancient tales of early Magvel true- did Luna hold the cities of the dead? There were no shades here, any more than there was a single blade of grass to be found in the crushed-basalt streets. But hands and tools had worked elaborate patterns into the dark surface of the tower's walls. Eleven hundred years... there was no telltale weathering of age here, no erosion of water or wind- only the subtler damage left by a constant rain of micrometeorites.
At the base of the tower, Eirika spied another chunk of green glass, but she had no time to collect it. Marth was already on the bottom step of the tower's spiraling stairway. The commander's checklist must have very different directions than the one she was given, Eirika thought. Marth was moving with a purpose, and like a good second officer, Eirika fell in behind.
The tower stairs were slow going in pressure suits, even with the weak gravity allowing them to bounce upward. If the stairs were designed to human scale, Eirika might have found them impossible, but these stairs- like all else in the city- were far more wide and broad than any human might need. They ascended one bouncing step at a time, up to the height of a five-story Terran building; three times they paused to sip water from their packs, and Eirika hoped the tiny amounts of liquid would be enough to see them through this excursion. To say none of this had been in her training... well, that was an understatement of the first degree. The commands of the ground crew, exhorting her to monitor her oxygen consumption and to mind the heat, just made this sudden jaunt into urban exploration even more bizarre.
Eirika could feel perspiration pooling in her boots by the time they reached the tower's top. The tower had no ceiling, just five delicate rays of basalt forming an ornamental cap... just like the ornament atop the ancient temple of Valni. At its center rested what, to Eirika's eyes, could only be called a sarcophagus, hewn of the same fine-grained basalt. Despite the overall scale of the temple, this sarcophagus seemed the right size for a human child.
"We've reached the endpoint of this excursion," she heard Marth radio back to Terra. "We'll rest here, collect some key samples, and head back to the base."
"Affirmative. Please deploy the memorial."
Marth took out a white zippered pouch, identical to the one in which their landing-site plaque had been carried. Eirika had been told that they'd place the second plaque to mark the most distant point of their adventures, but this plaque didn't look anything like the one they'd left at the landing site. It was a shield-shaped piece of metal, adorned with what looked like five gems. The arrangement of stones matched the five-part symmetry of the structure around them.
Marth set down the shield in a depression on the sarcophagus lid. It fit exactly; as Marth stepped back, the gems on the shield blazed up with a rainbow of light. Eirika shielded her eyes from the unexpected colors; surely that burst of red, blue, green, and gold was so bright that the telescopes on Terra pointed up at them had seen it? That Roy had seen it from orbit? But Roy, if he was on their side of Luna, had no comment on it. When the lights died, Eirika could see that the sarcophagus lid, which at first had appeared melded to the base in a seamless whole, was slightly ajar. There was been no sound, but of course there was no sound at all here. No sound, no wind, no water... just this airless dead city with an opened coffin at its center.
On Terra's gravity, two fairly small adults would never have been able to move that slab of basalt, but on Luna's gravity it was possible. Even so, Eirika was sure her fingernails had torn inside of her gloves. But the slab soon lay on the floor of this... temple? Tomb? The slab was on the floor, and the opened sarcophagus awaited them.
"Let's get that specimen," Marth said then.
To Be Continued...
Author's Notes: I wasn't going to re-invent "One small step..." for this thing! But I did half-inch the "beautiful rocks" comment from John Young, commander of Apollo 16.
Oh, yeah. Dead city on the moon. Well, you knew this was going someplace odd, right? And no, I don't think the chunks of green glass are from meteor strikes. Just sayin'.