Like the species she represented, she had always been a creature of two minds; dissatisfied unless her brain was wrapped around two dreams at once: one immediately controlling her eyes and fingers and all of the other things belonging to the real world, while her heart burned with some more essential, private dream. Now, as she lay on a custom-built couch, her essential mind was on a beach walk with Stephanos, nights ago.
They had climbed through a notch in the dune vegetation, and sat down as the surrounding sea oats framed the moon and hid everything else. She laid her head in his lap.
“Tell me stories of the night,” she said.
He stroked her sensibly-short hair and smiled at the way she always asked for his stories. He thought awhile, and then pointed up at the moon.
“The ancients,” he said, “called her Selene.”
“What, the moon?”
“Your moon.”
She turned her eyes into the pale white light.
“They said she was destined to someday give birth to Pandia, which means ‘all-brightness.’ Homer said Pandia was ‘exceeding lovely amongst the deathless gods.’”
She said, “And all I have to do, to give us that daughter, is to touch the moon.”
He smiled in the darkness, and said nothing. She stretched her arm one faint yard toward the moon.
“Seems so easy,” she said. “Seems so impossible.”
“And yet, you are the hope of people dedicated to doing the impossible.”
#
Back in her first mind, she heard a bodyless voice ask a question. She studied a screen and replied. “42.5. Nominal.”
#
Stephanos, at the beach, pointed back at the moon.
“The Lakota indigenous people have their own story: a legend that the Sun and the Moon were once lovers, living together in each other’s arms. One day, their followers got into a war over which of their gods was greater. After, it was decreed that the Sun and the Moon would live together forever in the same sky, but forever separate, seeing each other only rarely. The legend has it that, on those rare occasions when the Sun and the Moon are allowed to come together, the Moon is so hungry for her lover, that she gobbles up all of his light, and doesn’t spare any for the Earth. And thus, we have eclipses.”
Giggles. “I think I’m glad they don’t allow you to teach science.”
He gave a noncommittal wave she barely saw in the night.
“All wisdom is poetry, dear Ann. That was science, told with a flair. Modern scientific cosmology says that the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth were once the same heavenly object. They split, and gave birth to life, and mankind. And you. Although I do think you’re mostly moon.”
She raised an imaginary glass.
“To reunions.”
#
In her first mind, she heard the voice say, “One minute,” and she answered, “Roger that.”
#
At the beach, with Stephanos, she said, “Those are other people’s stories. What’s your story, oh my wise teacher?”
He stared out at the unceasing waves and thought.
“A story of a lonely man, in love with a world that didn’t love him. One day a beautiful goddess held him and welcomed him a to the humanity he thought had rejected him years ago.”
She smiled and sat up.
“Ah, but what about the moon? These are supposed to be stories about the moon.”
“Like all mankind, he is literally built of pieces of the moon, held together with moonbeams. Every moment since the dawn of creation, tiny particles of moondust have fallen to the earth, driven by the sun’s powerful radiation. And they become part of every one of us. To be a man is to be shot through by the moon.”
“Yes, but what of the moon in this story?”
“She, too, is waiting for that girl.”
She kissed his arm.
“You are such a dreamer.”
He paused.
“We are all dreamers. And you are the apex of those dreams.”
She squeezed his arm.
“And you are the protector of those dreams.”
She stood up, did a slow 360 and scanned the beach cottages and industrial buildings that now appeared beyond the grass.
“Well, I am going to go be the protector of sleep. We have a lot of work in the days ahead.”
He stood up and surveyed the cottages to find the path home.
“That we do.”
#
In her mind of the here and now, and for mankind’s future, Artemis Mission Commander Ann Bradley lay strapped to her couch in the cramped metal capsule balanced atop the 98-meter-tall SLS launch vehicle. She glanced at her companions as the voice counted down.
“Three, two, one. Liftoff. Liftoff, of Mankind’s Return to the Moon.”
Ann said, “Roger, Control.”
Flames finally poured out of her rocket, the way her species’ dreams had poured out for centuries. She felt her new home shake with the fire until it broke free of her old earth home and rejoined the sky where her species belonged. She glanced out the window at the Launch Control Center and her second mind imagined she saw the man she loved inside it.
In the Launch Control Center, Range Safety Officer Stephanos Palmas kept his hand hovering over the switch with ABORT written on it in big red letters. His eyes were focused with an all-consuming vision on the screens in front of him, searching for any sign of trouble that would mean he would need to hit that switch and save the crew—his crew—from a mission gone bad, at a cost of giving up mankind’s dream of the moon. Only when he heard the voice say, “MECO” did he take his hand away, and allow it to begin a very human shaking as he watched his dream, and the dream of mankind, sailing to their destiny.
Michael Guillebeau is a seventy-two-year-old former NASA worker and novelist. He lives in Madison, Alabama, Panama City Beach, Florida, and Portland, Oregon. And on the road between them all.