Red Moon

TA SHU 3 yueliang ren Moon Person

My friends, it seems there is more happening on the moon than I knew. And as my friend Bao said, all of it knits together. Perhaps. Actually I am coming to doubt that. But certainly things go fast here.

That’s what happens when factories build factories. Moon rocks have a lot of metals in them, and an infinity of silica. And at the Peaks of Eternal Light, there is always solar energy to power the extraction and rendering of all these materials. Computers, 3-D printers, and robotic assemblers did much of the work involved, and as always, humans were the lubricant that kept the machines working at their many points of systemic friction. Together we and our machines excavated and aerated underground lunar spaces, and mined materials and built machines, and imported carbon and nitrogen, and then in greenhouses we grew soil and food, and lumber for interior construction, and the more we accomplished the faster it all went, in the usual way now familiar to all.

Of course there were many things needed for this process that we had to bring with us—nonhuman lubricants, plastics, all other oil-based materials, and many other useful elements that don’t exist on the moon, including almost all the carbon and nitrogen, which together are so crucial to life. We had to ship a lot of stuff up here, which meant building up our capacity for space flight. There’s really no good way of getting stuff off the Earth except by blasting it up in rockets, but it is possible to build those rockets on the moon, and easier to launch them from here than from Earth. If you are only moving materials and not people, you can build big freighters and throw them into semi-stable figure-eight orbits between Earth and moon. Shuttles can accelerate to catch up and transfer loads to these big craft, thus minimizing the costs of transport. With no humans aboard, these rockets can be simpler and cheaper, and can be made to accelerate and decelerate harder. So robotic interplanetary shipping has been part of the speed of our settling here.

All this has made for impressive results, such as the big complex at the south pole, and this line of settlements running up the libration zone.

Now I’ve left one of these new settlements, the Petrov Crater Station, to stand outside on the surface of the moon. To do so I have donned a spacesuit, and I exited the shelter through air locks, and now I am walking on the surface of the moon. This is the first time I have ever walked by myself on the moon. It feels very strange, I can assure you!

Outside, it is daytime. I was told it is the lunar morning, about halfway between dawn and midday. Shadows are black, but not pitch-black; reflection of sunlight from other lit surfaces tints the shadows to varying degrees, giving me an extra sense of the shapes of the hills, derived from the shades of black and gray in the shadows. Where the land is in sunlight, it’s very bright. We’re at about twenty degrees latitude here, so the sun is fairly high in the sky. My faceplate is tinted and keeps the sunlight from damaging my eyes. I don’t know what it would look like if the tint wasn’t there. Although it’s adjustable, I was told, so let’s dial it down and see. Oh my. Oh. Yes. The tinting was much darker than I thought. No doubt also polarized and so on. Right now I can’t see a thing. I’m blinded. With the tint taken away, the world is simply bursting with white light. I can’t even see the shadows. It’s as if the sun were a god and has struck me with a bolt of lightning for my presumption in daring to look at it as it really is. Wow!

I’ve got the tinting back up high now, but it will take a while for my pupils to dilate. I’m sure they were trying to close up completely! I wonder if that’s possible. The chiaroscuro effect as I regain my vision is extreme. No subtleties of gray now, just a very harsh white, and an absence of white that is a grainy black. No stars visible to me now. The sky is even blacker than any shadow on the land. A wrenching field of contrasts. Simply white and black, the black of those particular bird feathers that capture all the light that strikes them. It looks to me now as if I have gone mad or am suffering a seizure. But let’s agree to call this an exposure to reality. The sublime, in a certain strain of Western aesthetics, is said to be a fusion of beauty and terror. In China the Seven Feelings don’t mention this combination, but now I think I know what it is. It’s a true feeling, the sublime—it’s spirit confronted by sheer matter, as Hegel put it.

Under my feet the ground is white, touched here and there by shadows of rocks. My vision is coming back. The rocks lie on a blanket of white dust that looks somewhat like snow, or loess. The rocks are isolatoes, and their appearance is random; they have not been distributed by any stream or glacier or wave—not by any water action of any kind. This is immediately obvious when you look around. The rocks don’t look right! Nothing has sorted them, and their sizes are also random—small, large, in between. They look like they have dropped here out of the sky, and they have. Many are the size of pots or baskets, and almost all of them look like roughly rounded cubes, without any of the sharp facets you see in the Earth’s mountains, where so many rocks have recently broken. These rocks are not weathered or weather-beaten; they are sun-beaten. Billions of years of photon rain, unfiltered by clouds or even air, have slowly knocked the edges off these rocks. That withering weathering of photonic rain looks different from other kinds of weathering, as for instance by water rain. And I recall the ventifacts of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys, rocks shaped by the abrasion of wind-blown sand. These by analogy could be called solarfacts. There are a lot of them. It’s necessary to step around them. The old movies of the Apollo astronauts don’t reveal this all that often, but those astronauts were just like me; they had to avoid walking into rocks, or treading on rocks underfoot.

Another way I am like the Apollo people, and everyone else walking on the moon, is that I have to adjust my gait to the gravity. In this it’s the same out here as indoors, except out here one has to wear a spacesuit, so really it isn’t the same. I weigh about ten kilos on the moon, and my spacesuit and its air supply weigh about the same. What that means is that about half my perceived weight is right there in my skin. I am feeling a bit hollow, in other words, as well as very light altogether. I jump, oh my! Look out! Oh my. Fallen to my knees, as you may have deduced from my visuals. But it’s very easy to push myself back up. Oh, wait—not so easy! Not so easy to keep my balance. Must restore balance, just a second here. Kind of a dance step. Might as well dance, hopping or skipping with one foot always kept in front leading the way. Beautiful!

Spinning slowly around, trusting I can recover my balance if I lose it, or just get back up, I see the hills look odd too. Not tectonic action, nor rain, nor riverbeds, nor glaciers, nor wind shaped these hills. They are uncanny. You can see something is different here, and it’s hard not to feel it’s wrong. The uncanny is always wrong, always frightening. And these hills? They were made by meteors impacting the moon at cosmic speed, coming in faster than when we landed here in our very fast spaceship. Boom! Incredible impact! Huge masses of rock, vaporized to melted slag and thrown up and outward, to fall in circles or ovals around the impact site. Mostly circles. Apparently you have to hit at quite a glancing angle before an oval gets made. In any case, impact after impact, circle after circle, until eventually the circles lay on top of one another, in a palimpsest many layers deep. The later impacts therefore landed not on the hard basalt of old lava basins, but on earlier circles and their circumferences of rubble. Slowly but surely this made the land lumpy. Actually, given all that, it should look even more torn up than it does; but all of that happened long ago, and since then the sun has been breaking the rocks apart into this infinite blanket of dust.

When I jump on this dust, I don’t sink in far. I think it has compressed under the pull of the moon’s gravity until it’s pretty well packed. This was a question they didn’t really have an answer for when they first landed on the moon. Those Apollo landers could have sunk right in and disappeared into soft dust, like a rock into quicksand! But they didn’t. The scientists figured it would be this way, and decided to test it and see, trusting their analysis. And the astronauts trusted the scientists. One of them said about this, Even from within the program I thought it was a little audacious. A little! Ha! This was a real trust in feng shui! And indeed we trust our geomancies every day of our lives.

I’ve brought out with me today the items needed to conduct another Apollo experiment I learned about. The astronaut who performed it said it was inspired by Galileo, who predicted it would be this way. Here I have an ordinary hammer, and a feather. Looks like it’s a pigeon feather, one of the little fine ones from a pigeon’s neck. I hold out the hammer and the feather, one in each hand, and drop them at the same moment. Oh my! Ha ha ha, did you see it? I can’t believe it! I think that may be the strangest thing I have ever seen! They didn’t fall very fast, that in itself was a little surprising—but at the very same speed? Feather and hammer? I can hardly believe my eyes! Wait, I’m going to do it again. Difficult to pick up a feather with gloves. Dusty. Okay, here it goes. Wow. It happened again. Same speed down. Now I know for sure I am someplace different. In a vacuum. Well, it almost makes me afraid. No—no, it does make me afraid. This is not what I thought it was, this place is not what it looks like. It’s not just Xinjiang or Tibet. This is an alien shore, this is not a human place. I must trust my spacesuit not to fail. And I must remember, if I can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don’t usually see it so clearly.

Walking around again now. Wow, I can’t believe what I just saw. I feel like jumping, and I bet I can jump high, let’s try that. Wow. I’ll try a little higher, and come down and jump again. And again! Now I am a rabbit, maybe even a kangaroo! Ah ha ha ha, oh my, sorry, I will try to compose myself, but ha ha ha ha, oh my. Not so easy. Jumping! The moon is funny! It’s scary too, yes, terrifying actually, it shouldn’t be this funny but it is! I can’t stop jumping! And why should I? Excuse me while I fly!

At the highest point of my jumps, I see the horizon shifts a bit. It is so near and so irregular that I can catch glimpses over the horizon, just by jumping into the sky! The white top of a hill pops into sight over a nearby shaded hollow, disappears again, reappears, disappears. Oh it is all so strange, it feels so strange!