Earth’s Silent Moon

by Jimmy Dreese

Oh, I could have sung the year I heard about the moon ejected by the Procyon star system! My core churned deep and swilled around. I felt my insides warm and my volcanoes all erupt. That year, I passed through twelve fresh comet trails, which tickled, and the solar wind rinsed coolly over me. This was a year of pleasures and promises. Morale expanded. For the first year in billions, I forgot about my own moon.

But in our waiting for that ejected moon to arrive, we began forgetting all the normal pleasures too, of soft winds and comet trails, and even of our normal yearly impacts. We didn’t care for anything but that far-away ejected moon, on its way.

I know I should have felt sorry for the Procyonic moon. I couldn’t imagine what it would have felt like, to be ejected. Mars told me it had been the fourth moon of some big thing like Jupiter, and we all know they have it roughest. I heard of one moon who orbited content and settled for five billion years, and then shwing!, no warning, ejected. Twelve million years of black and empty space. To be all alone that way, I just couldn’t imagine.

I ought to have been thinking about that side of things more, I know, but when I hear about something that big coming our way, the prospect of impact excites me. I’m sure you know what I mean… a SHWOOM and that huge rush deep through your core exploding from the impact site. It can crack you, and you can bleed, and you feel so EXISTENT. You are gone from this monotony, into thorough bliss.

We all were born of impacts. We were suckled on impacts. So today, we crave impacts.

We know, though, that we might die in an impact. Perhaps our desire is part danger. We know that something big enough head-on would shatter and devastate us. I think about Mercury. Mercury wanted a deep impact like we all do, and when it came, it broke her. The thing was gargantuan and rigid, and it came when we were young. Did she know what it would do to her when she saw it on its impact course? I’ve never asked her.

But she hit it almost square on, and we saw her slow down sickeningly in the crunch. When she rounded the sun once more, her entire surface had been changed. Or rather, her surface all was gone, blasted out and pulverized to space. She was only a core. For ages she was silent. She blotted us out, and we feared her. Today she speaks nonsensically and babbles. I think Venus, who accreted some of Mercury’s ejected dust, still talks to her. Nothing has shattered me yet, and so I’m lucky, but I did have my big impact that could have crumbled me to sand.

It was back even before Mercury cracked, so I didn’t understand how dangerous impacts could be. I knew only their rough pleasure. At the same time, I was new and young, still almost molten. I remembered birth and exhilaration. Back then, nothing was done forming, and small impacts were tiringly common. Impacts between giant planetessimals like Venus, Mars, and me were rare though.

The planetessimal who struck me was as massive as Mars, thick and hot. Her iron glittered with passionate invitation. I watched her approach impatiently. We pulled together in space. Our soft, bright surfaces bulged out towards one another hungrily in strong, tall waves that broke our crusts. Magma swilled. Rocks melted and vaporized in the blaze without fire, only raw heat.

Then, in one red moment, we crashed against each other. Our crusts grew indistinguishable in collision. Her rocks heaved into mine and mixed. She pressed deep against me and into me so that my adhesive magma solidified from pressure alone and bound her to me.

In the next moment, her momentum carried her farther into me. The rocks of her crust stuck with lava to mine and ripped away from her body. I tore at her brutally and ripped her crust from her. Each continent I tore from her scorched against me. I sucked at her magma. It coated my surface where the ruins of her crust lay shivering in heat. It smoothed me.

Finally there was her core, rotating, smashing, and tearing. It was huge and hard and might have shattered me. I might have died and sunk into the sun, but her naked, solid core sliced me at an angle. I felt a roaring gouge sear through my side as my rotation slowed against her backward force. She blasted crust away from me in erupting pain. My rock and magma innards ripped away and passed out into orbit, away from me, where I couldn’t feel them. The gouge burned to my core. My surface cracked in fissures, and I vomited explosive plumes of glowing lava. My consciousness expanded bubble-like and broke. I felt formed from emptiness, not knowing what part of me was gone or when this was that I now existed. I slept.

The burning planetessimal became absorbed in me, so that I could feel her feelings. Our magma coursed together beneath our fused crusts, and I welcomed her consciousness into me. The fact that she didn’t mind being in me either let me settle down. She became me, and for a while she and I were us, and now we’re simply me.

The gouge she carved in me filled and disappeared. I felt new impacts and craved still more. I remembered the gouging pleasure of her impact into me. But my rock and my magma she had blasted out of me orbited angrily around me and taunted me with its distance. Soon it coalesced and made the moon, which would not come back to me despite my coaxes and wrenching tugs. It would not fall back and fill back in the filled-in gouge where it belonged. Instead it circled me and consumed my view. I resented my moon.

“Of course,” Venus said one year, “it wasn’t as if you chose to have that moon.” Already back then, Venus enveloped herself in haze. Her busty scorched cloud tops obscured her surface totally. Asteroids and rubble sank beneath her clouds and punctured unseen craters. She lived alone.

“Of course I didn’t.” Venus and I were nearly the same size, but while she had boiled, I had cooled. I grew great blue oceans that evaporated and rained back down to me. I had private pleasures now: the fleeting tickles of whirlwinds and the delicate massages of erosion.

She cackled. If her volcanoes were erupting, I couldn’t see them. She might not have even had volcanoes. “Yes, but you see, none of us chooses to be impacted.”

“Yes we do. I see that asteroid, and I want it, and it hits me.”

“Precisely, Earth.” She paused a day. “Yes, you see it, you want it, and it comes. But you can’t make it come, and you can’t stop it coming.” Her haze lay blank. She wore no storms. “Your moon exists because of chance. You had no choice.”

I felt tornadoes die on my crust. They stopped ripping at mountains and filling deep craters. “No, no, you’re wrong. Have you seen how Jupiter bends asteroids? She makes them bend, and they change their course. Jupiter chooses impacts, and so do I.”

“Please don’t be a fool. Jupiter pulls asteroids, but has she ever pushed one away? She has no choice but to pull. None of us can choose.”

“She could push an asteroid away, but why would she want to? We love impacts.” I trembled angrily at my tectonic faults. She was smaller than the most insignificant of Jupiter’s clouds, yet she pretended to understand her.

“But should we love them?” She pressed at me. I hated her. “Poor, poor Mercury. Miserable.”

My volcanoes plugged down to my mantle. I grew cold at Venus. My oceans froze.

“And poor Earth, with an accidental moon.”

I had wanted that impact that had made my moon. I had needed the mother planetessimal to impact me, and I had needed to feel the rush of birth and the pull of her consciousness. My moon might be unplanned and vexing, but I had wanted the impact, and we had pulled together. I left Venus behind her acid clouds.

The scar of the moon’s birth gouge faded. Like all my crust it cracked into tectonic faults and buckled into mountains, but as healed as it might have been, I still lusted for my moon. It circled me silently, never leaving, never returning, but trapped above me where I couldn’t reach it. If I’d had strength like Jupiter’s I would have pulled it down to me and let it spew over my surface, slathering me in chalk.

I watched my moon orbit and turn, and as it orbited, its turning slowed. Eventually it stopped and faced me blankly looking down, or it could have been looking out away from me. I didn’t know what part of its surface it saw things through.

In time, I saw that talking to my moon was useless. It never spoke or responded to me. For a while volcanoes erupted meekly on its surface, but even those died pitifully away. It didn’t speak or couldn’t. Did it hate me, want to leave me? Maybe it was truly dead, or eternally lost in the remembered ecstasy of gouging birth.

My moon felt the same winds as me and basked in the same neutrino glows. We shared comet trails, but still the moon stayed distant, cold, and empty. My empty efforts sickened me. My obsession grew to frigid anger at the moon’s unresponsiveness and then softened in pity. Mars tried to talk to my moon sometimes, and when the moon was new, Venus beckoned it beneath her haze only to harass me, but I wished my moon would go with her and leave me, so I could think of something else.

The moon and I approached Mars one day. “Hey,” I said. The moon languished between us. Mars and I watched it pass for six whole days. We both were silent this time. Compared to each of us, it was so small. But it should have been big enough to talk, to feel, and to make choices.

“Your moon’s new crater is very becoming.”

He annoyed me. “Yeah, wouldn’t know. It hit on the far side, and I can’t see that, remember?”

I plugged the rest of my fuming thoughts below my crust, that if my moon did not exist, all its impacts would be mine. Mars and I both rotated, and the next day we faced each other again. We had been friends for four billion years.

“Yes, well, there are other asteroids.”

And then the moon from Procyon arrived! In the eighty or so of my years before it got here, the solar system talked of it exclusively. We all wanted that moon: an unfamiliar delicacy to subsume into our consciousness. Beyond the jolting pleasure-burst of crushing, swirling impact, it would release us from monotony for a time, and we would learn a new language from that moon and feel its different feelings. We would remember places in this cosmos we had never been.

Jupiter saw it first and churned up glistening storms. She wrapped her red bands of clouds in knots and pumped heat in billows through the asteroid belt. Clouds belted from her surface up in huge arcs taller than I was wide as if to snatch the moon and claim it.

Venus passed my orbit silently beneath the unreadable haze. I wanted to know what she was thinking, but I didn’t speak to her.

Mars told me that year, “I think it will come to me this time.”

Mercury called loudly, “DISOWN NOTHING.”

I built frightened glaciers and sluiced them through with volcanic rapture.

The ejected moon fell almost perpendicular to the solar system’s plane. For five years, no planet spoke, but we all watched that moon and pulled it towards us greedily and powerfully. My surface was firmer now, and this ejected moon was smaller than She had been. And so my outside didn’t bulge or crack in yearning, but I felt the moon’s extrasolar tug.

It could come. It could hit me. My own moon passed above me. My moon, come home or GO! But I focused: the Procyonic moon descended towards Mercury whose mottled core silhouetted itself against the sun. She screamed in premature ecstasy and terrible fear, but she needn’t have.

I turned to night and saw Jupiter. She grew angry and jealous and she pulled. Jupiter swung the foreign moon outward even harder than the Sun drew in. The Procyonic moon soared past Mercury who groaned. We all then thought the moon was lost. It now sped away from us but slowing, slowing, slowing. We didn’t know if it could escape the solar system.

It stopped. Then it came back, falling towards the sun. Jupiter again pulled wrenchingly at it. The ejected moon twisted up and arced below Venus towards me. For a moment I thought it would hit me. My southern oceans grabbed at it in a momentary tide, but then it passed, past me toward Jupiter, who’d won, and Mars got in the way.

It crunched into his surface in billows of pluming dust. Mars’s old face moaned and opened into a raw crater. The foreign moon sank deeply into him, and the shockwave bubbled back out of the crater in a mountain at its center. The moon consumed Mars in pleasure as thoroughly as Mars consumed the moon in substance. It was twelve years before he’d calmed down enough to talk.

Mars spoke slowly when he spoke. I heard new serenity in his voice. “Earth, hello again.”

“Oh. Hi. Doing well?”

“This solar system, did you know how beautiful it is?”

But this was not so different from the way Mars had always been. Mars’s dull red dusty surface lay open at the sun. I saw shadows in his craters. The newest crater stood out near his equator, perfectly unchanged by only twelve years. His ice caps melted silently.

I left his question unanswered for two years, but I said, “I suppose it is. But you would know better than me.”

“Oh, no, not really. We both exist, do we not?”

I silenced.

“The moon, the one who hit me just now, he saw us from extremely far away. He thought we were a beautiful solar system.”

I thought of Venus’s dirty haze. “Oh yeah, beautiful until you ripped his rock to blast-bits and consumed him. How beautiful that must have been for him.” I passed Mars in orbit and fell away. I rounded the sun angry and saw Mercury and Venus there together.

Mercury screamed, “CHOOSE!” I saw her raw exposed burnt core and for a moment, I envied her insanity. She had no confusion and no shell of crust. Everything she experienced was at her core. I wanted to talk with her then as I never had. But Venus loomed there dwarfing her. I let them disappear around the sun.

When I found Mars again, he was passing slowly between the sun and Jupiter. He marveled at his small eclipse of her.

“Mars,” I said, “I guess I was just really hoping for that moon, you know?”

He turned. I saw gouged riverbeds across him slowly, slowly filling in. “Oh, I know. But eh, impacts. I wonder if we’re growing too old for them sometimes.”

I let my southernmost volcano spew in a chuckle. “You only say that because your impact with that moon was enough to last you ages. The rest of us are starving.”

Mars paused. “Perhaps so.” I watched him turn upon his axis. His north had winter then, so that the larger ice cap circled to low latitudes, and his thin atmosphere condensed into the ice. His volcanoes remained plugged, and there blew no wind. Mars was quiet.

For days I watched him, and then I saw to Mar’s west, two asteroids wayward. They both were metallic and irregularly reflective so that they sparkled in their hurling paths towards me. Mars saw the asteroids, and by him they flew. He watched them go, and there was something in his craters like lava.

I beckoned them to me. I willed my crust to bulge to suck them in, bid my humans to construct electromagnets to attract them here. One asteroid soared ahead of the other and twisted in sickness. Yes. Impact me to bliss.

The asteroid sliced my atmosphere where it created sixteen tickling whirlwinds. When it struck my hungry crust, I moaned. I felt the crater vividly and understood this feeling perfectly. The seismic waves rippled roughly through me. I released control of my volcanoes and my plates. I merely existed, and I waited for the second asteroid to impact.

It didn’t. When I recovered from my brief impact, I searched frantically around. Had I missed it in my bliss? Had I been unconscious? But I saw my moon, where gray dust fell around a fresh metallic crater.

As the grip of my own impact loosened, I grew angry. My atmosphere clouded with dust and I felt myself grow cold. My polar caps advanced. My oceans sunk dangerously low. The moon had robbed me of my double impact. But there wasn’t anything I could do.

The moon’s impact had blasted moon rocks up into orbit between us. My weak moon could not hold on to them. I watched them circle lazily, freed and alone, repulsing me. After two years, they both fell. My atmosphere tore at them and burned them black. I wanted them to incinerate entirely and streak across my atmosphere into oblivion, but I let the moon’s rocks land softly on my northern oceans lodged in ice. In my ice, the moon rocks hovered over my rocky ocean bottom, and I did not absorb them into me. I wanted nothing to do with my moon then.

There above me rolled my moon. “You are nothing!” I screamed at its distance and its silence. “You were part of me! You were me, and now you’ll never be part of me again.” I wanted to eject the moon and hurl it from me. My moon would wheel out of the solar system into blackness for fifty-million years. It would feel no comet trails or winds, only emptiness and starving clouds of hydrogen. And then someday, it would crash into a something and be ripped, absorbed, and overtaken. I never would think of it again.

I spun wildly around for days, willing my moon to disappear and leave me, but each day it still hung there. “GO.” But I could not eject my moon. I was not strong enough, even though I needed this so thoroughly.

Years passed, and I ostracized my moon from thought. The old gouge ached dully. My oceans stayed low, but the dust cleared from my atmosphere. Gradually my caps began to melt again. A few volcanoes belched hot air. One year, I let a huge eruption flow. The lava released and cascaded over me warm and rejuvenating. Enough warmth, and I freed the moon rocks from their ice bonds and felt them on my ocean floor. Finally, I let myself absorb the rocks from my estranged and silent moon, which really were my own rocks, who billions of years ago had been severed from me. I let them sink into me and become pieces of me again. I searched them cursorily for feelings. I wanted to find nothing and prove to myself my moon’s true worthlessness. At first, there was nothing.

But then I shivered, barely. In my memory flashed an image I had never seen, of myself in space seen from above. I felt a foreign confusion seep into my mantle and a sick dread of abandonment tremble weakly in my soil. The feelings were so faint they barely existed, but magma solidified, chilled into my crust and thickened it.

I discovered, then, that the moon was not dead, but that the moon was lost. It was confused and moaning on the inside, not in hurt, but in the way of having never formed the way it should have been. The moon was made violently and suddenly, and incorrectly somehow that I didn’t understand. It had a soul, but it had no core. I felt fright and pity.

“Wake up!” I said. “Wake up, please?” But the moon didn’t. I couldn’t comfort it.

I looked up at my moon. Horrible sadness of neglect and helplessness filled me like my magma all had been emptied. After five billion years, I knew at last it was alive, and it needed help somehow, but after five billion years, I still could not bring it back to me. I comforted the moon rocks inside of me, and I felt them grow warm and fade to the back in my consciousness like the moon’s mother had. I kept my thoughts with the moon and studied it until I understood its naked craters’ patterns.

Here is my plan: someday, an even larger something will come to the solar system towards me and my moon. I will pull it harder than I have ever pulled, so that it crashes itself into my moon and brings my moon back down to me. This something that hits us will need to be gigantic, fast, and direct. Maybe it will shatter me. If it doesn’t, though, then I’ll be back with my moon after a lifetime torn apart, to remind it of its core and to pass through comet trails together.