Moonflower

When the planes can sleep soundly in the hay,
When the guns, they have nothing more to say,
When the moon’s gaze is silent on the bay,
White flower, white flower.
—southern Albionite folk song

It would be tempting to imagine that the first Albionite to survive a landing on our Holy Moon would do so with a prayer. They would declare the fervent wish of the dead generations to let paradise find release from the bones of Albion, perhaps. Or something simpler: a quiet word of respect and awe. And I wonder if, one day, when they write the history of our deeds, that is what they will have me say.

It’s not what I said, though. I said ‘oh fuck’.

We decoupled without a problem. Our descent followed perfectly the gravity curve, wasting not a drop of precious fuel. Our flight computer performed just as it had in a thousand practice runs. The landing site was clear, flat, free of boulders.

It wasn’t enough to save them.

Later, I would determine that the landing spar was the problem. A structural weakness in the steel caused it to shear into a perfect, heavenly lance aligned precisely with the worst possible corner. The force of our landing drove it straight through the metal and into the spine of esteemed Flight Engineer Uyam, breaking the pressure seal on her suit and scattering thirty years of rocketry experience out across the regolith.

I was at this moment throttling down, announcing my historic first words as the spacecraft listed unexpectedly. After that… I believe the descent fuel tank, still quite full thanks to my fine efforts, collided with the oxidiser. A brief but searing gout of flame would have sprayed upwards, directly through seat of Geologist-Royal Zhu Quan. I, however, could not really assess this situation, since that was the moment when the emergency charges fired. My pilot capsule detached from the lander, bounced twice, and came to rest with a perfect angle to view the rest of the rocket fold in on itself like a closing flower.

By the time I’d pulled myself out and made my way back to what was left of the lander, Uyam was most certainly dead. Zhu Quan at least had somehow survived, but with the state of their legs this was hardly relief.

The third of the descent team, Botany Master Harani Haran, was at first nowhere to be found. Likely crushed or incinerated. But after a moment of fear that I would soon be the only living Albionite on this barren world for the duration of my oxygen, I spotted it—the blue of her spacesuit, thrown some ten metres or so away.

If there was any mercy, it was that nothing was still on fire. The vacuum was good for something.

What did I do? Well, what I had to, of course. Harani was unconscious, and I dared not move her for fear of a spine injury. Once I was sure she was alive, I dragged an oxygen tank from the pilot module and connected it to her suit. Quan got the sealing foam treatment; after some sweating and swearing I got them free of the metal petals and over to where Harani was lying. Most of our equipment was surely shredded in the wreck of the lander, but thankfully someone had had the foresight to equip the pilot module with its own small inflatable tent. I got to pressurising it while I waited for the orbiter to come back over the horizon.

This was the beginning of the first successful pilgrimage to the Holy Moon of Albion. Auspicious, I think you’ll agree.

Harani woke up first. It took her longer to become lucid, so I sang quietly in that tent, burning precious oxygen to remind her of our home and our cause. White flower, white flower. Eventually, she joined in. She rolled over to drape a hand across my face—and the Moon was merciful, her spine was intact.

Quan would be harder to treat with the equipment we had available. It felt rather like that last tour in the trenches, fighting for one more month of Jianese independence. At least there was no rain! But if the second lander could survive its descent, Quan might still have a chance—to live, if not to walk.

The tent possessed a clever, if rather yonic, opening into my spacesuit, and I made use of it, leaving Quan to Harani’s care. Her specialism may be plants, but she was certainly the better medic as well, and I would only get in the way. Better to busy myself with setting up the leaves of the electrical system—north-facing, angled for our latitude—to sustain my brief radio conversations with the orbiter.

Anything to avoid thinking of Uyam.

We knew it would not be easy. We knew. And nobody’s life is very long, on Albion. All the same, it shouldn’t have been like this.

The first successful pilgrimage to the Holy Moon of Albion was a product of terrible historical coincidence.

Spring never came to the land of Jian. The winter campaign proved too gruelling for her people to sustain. Her armies broke, her cities rioted, and before long the planes of the Baronic Federacy—don’t bother writing that down, it doesn’t exist anymore—cut lines across her skies as their armies closed in on each of her cities. They did not come to sue for peace, but to sack our land for their other wars. Jian, at last, was gone.

Jian had a marvellous deterrent, to stop something like this from happening. Should the capital be threatened by invaders, innumerable missile silos would open in many hidden places, and vengeful Jian would lay waste to her enemy with Heaven’s fire—provoking no doubt their retaliation, a cleansing war that would finally relieve Albion from the plague of its people. Perhaps the Barons guessed that this was an empty threat. But I would wager they did not know why.

The rocket that took me and my fellows to our Holy Moon was stolen. Our conspiracy was long in the making, far longer than my life. And we Lunarists were not all of Jian, and in time rockets would fly from other lands—we formed a nation of our own, a secret nation, a nation of purpose rather than blood. But it was Jian who cast the first seed of our Lunar garden to actually take root, and I take some pride in that.

As the Barons’ soldiers fell on our cities, we determined it was time to make our own move. The Lunarist engineers, infiltrated at all levels in Jian’s military hierarchy, seized control of the silos and command centres. We fuelled the special rocket, the one that had been adapted to reach the moon. Each stage had been tested in isolation, a project of clandestine decades, but the whole system was a gamble. There was every chance that we would explode on the launchpad. Or in the air. Or in orbit.

Still we flew.

White flower, white flower.

Harani grew white flowers.

The moonflower blooms in the mouth of corpses. Its name is self-explanatory: it is round, like the Moon, and white, like the Moon. And it is also, with a few genetic tweaks, a splendid source of oxygen.

It was part of the plan. The seeds had survived, in Harani’s pocket. The fertiliser, however, had all been in the lander.

I… hold on. No, I’m all right. It’s a long time ago now.

A memory for you. Uyam is laughing, and strikes a pose, the oxidiser line draped lazily over her shoulder. I am just behind, trying very hard to look dashing. My overalls are unzipped a tantalisingly calibrated distance. Someone wipes a thumb along my cheek, a photogenic streak of oil.

The photographer goes something like… hold on, let me do the voice. “Very bold! OK, say something patriotic.”

And Uyam gets the biggest grin and she just says, “We’ll fly to Heaven, and build a palace with our own hands.”

Well, the photographer laughs. “Sure, sure. Is that a new line they’re working on?”

“Something like that.” And she keeps smiling. The photographer shrugs, and squeezes the button. Click click click.

Later, at the barracks, I had a go. I would have been a little ball of righteous anger, like: “Uyi, what the fuck was that? What happened to secrecy?”

Back then, they were saying all sorts on the radio, right. Seditionist cults, that sort of thing.

Well, Uyam stopped lifting her weights for just a moment. Still smiling. Calm as anything. Just told me to chill, that they don’t get it.

“You’d better be right.” I told her. “I won’t see you eating moonflower, Uyi.”

I remember how we leaned together, Harani’s wiry arm around my shoulder, and watched the flowers bloom. Uyam’s body was dry, now, slowly being used up. But the flowers would last long enough.

I looked up at Harani. She looked down at me. I… looked away.

“She would have wanted this.” Harani said.

I said nothing. Perhaps I hated her, then?

“She would be glad,” Harani continued, “to still help the cause.” She sounded so doubtful.

Across the small tent, Quan grunted in pain.

Life went on, of course. The Moon might be a holy, miraculous place, but we still had a whole lot of palace to build.

Each day, I watched Albion twirl and glitter in the sky above. I would always think, where’s the war? That world of trench systems, front line and support and reserve, communication trench and sap, the scars that scrawled out and seemed to cover the whole world—from here, it remained invisible.

The second lander went through a thorough examination in orbit, and at last arrived. They reinforced the struts. Only the most minor damage! So our company of three became a company of seven. Not much of a nation, but more would come, if our work held true.

More tents rose around our first one, little blobs connected by pressure gates like a web of amoeba. We buried Uyam’s remains in the new fertiliser, and in this way, she became part of the first crop to be grown, here on the Holy Moon of Albion.

The first to give herself up wholly.

Messages came to us through the orbiter. Word of our feat must be spreading. Lunarites from across Albion sang our praises, wished us luck, pledged to join us soon. You could imagine what else was being said, though. Mockery, laughter, lunar exploitation plans… religious cries about defilement, betting pools on how long we would last.

I let my silent gaze follow Albion across the sky, searching for the bay from the song.

No more rockets came from Jian, nor any word from our control centre. Others had been prepared, but perhaps the Barons found the launch sites, or perhaps our compatriots destroyed their rockets to prevent anyone pursuing us.

The orbiter continued to rise and fall.

The second lander brought with it Chirurgeon Nguyễn Liên, and Quan’s legs were amputated one week after. They bore it with grace, all things considered. Maybe losing all those memories from having three legs fully severed… maybe I just didn’t know enough of their dialect to know how bad they were cursing.

But you wouldn’t understand, would you? Quan was getting on in age. Moulted twice. They weren’t going to grow back.

I helped to build them a prosthetic and crutches from the larger pieces of the first lander. A three-legged child again, they joined in the works eagerly, scanning and surveying to judge where to place more permanent structures. Despite everything, the project was somehow only a few weeks behind schedule. Not that the schedule meant much of anything with no more rockets to pursue us.

Harani led the project to begin cultivation of the regolith, figuring out what plants could survive it and leech out its minerals and turn it into fertiliser for the other plants when they died.

It sounded terribly complicated compared to rocketry. No, I’m quite serious. Rockets are predictable. You know exactly where they will go. Space is fundamentally simple. It’s on the ground that the trouble starts.

That’s the sort of thing that would give me away as a Lunarite, isn’t it?

There was a saying that if three albionites enter a room, they will get along famously, but if six enter a room, they will inevitably come to blows. But we seven got along amicably enough. Most were known to me from the Jian air force base, but two were relative strangers, who had arrived from some other cell shortly before we launched—making quite the entrance in a highjacked Baronic half-track. They were Cavia and Manon, split-twins from the Horseshoe archipelago, and while their Jianese was very good, they also spoke often in their own language, a dialect of Prassic.

To pass time in the rest periods, I asked them to teach me. Soon enough I was seasoning my speech with the odd Prassic phrase here and there. Manon found my accent hilarious, though she mostly managed not to giggle when I was in the room.

I don’t want to suggest I was the founder of the Lunarian language. We were all stitching together a pidgin, especially when the second rocket came. Jianese and Prassic were major ingredients, but so too was Sokee, and the Yad sign language which we Lunarites secretly shared. In the end it was quite unlike all of them.

Let me tell you about the second rocket. It was much bigger than the first one. Ours was a missile that had been turned to crewed spaceflight by some very reckless means, but the Sokee ship was purpose-built to bring pilgrims to the Holy Moon. It carried a mighty twenty-one people. (Don’t laugh, rockets were small back then!) All at once, our little colony would quadruple in size.

Get this, right—the Sokee rocket had no separate lander. They’d deorbit the whole machine. To keep things simple! Yeah.

I greeted it with some anxiety, fearing that the balance of power would shift in our colony with its change of demographics, but in fact these Sokee cosmonauts were terrifyingly young and rather less well-prepared than they thought—more religious zeal than practical experience. It was something of a miracle that they made it to the moon in one piece, but their luck ran out. Their landing was almost as much of a disaster as mine. Fuel gave out almost three metres from the ground and the rocket smeared itself across the moonscape. Barely avoided cutting right through our little habitat. But their crew compartment was built sturdy, and once we peeled it open, nearly all of them lived.

Suddenly I found myself in the position of teacher.

I think it started like this. At least, this is how I remember it. I was trimming the moonflowers with one of the Acolyte-Cosmonauts. It must have been Sāb.

“Is it true,” Sāb said, “that the Lunarites are more closely related to this flower than the other races of Albion?”

I blinked. I’d never heard that one before. My eyes found their way over to Harani, who was wearing a much more severe grimace.

“No.” she said. “Who told you that? We’re descended from the ancient land-jellyfish, same as everyone else. Somewhere in deep time we must have a common ancestor with the flower, but…”

“Master Haqui said so.” Sāb said, a whining, insistent edge in his voice. “We carry the heritage of the flower, which is why we have a greater affinity with the Moon.”

“Is Master Haqui an evolutionary biologist?” Her voice became testy, as it always did when the Sokee masters came up.

Sāb pouted. “It was revealed to him.”

“Revealed.”

“He dreamed of the flower growing within us, tempering the evil nature of Albion. So he ground up the flowers and extracted their essence, and meditated. Soon enough, the light of the moon shone from within, and we could see the blooming flowers curling inside him! Doesn’t that prove it, Sister?”

She scoffed and turned away.

“And what of the converts?” I said, unable to resist the bait. “Our people are not a race. We come from all parts of Albion.”

Sāb seemed taken aback by this. “Well, maybe it’s like a… a recessive gene.” he said. “Something that reveals itself in the children, even if it’s hidden in the parents.”

“And if someone didn’t have this gene? Could they become a Lunarite?” I looked at him across the petals, snipping an errant branch.

He met my gaze with fervour. “They wouldn’t. And if they tried, they’d still have the evil soil of Albion inside them. They could never be pure.”

“You’re only encouraging him, Ro.” Harani said.

So I just said I don’t think that’s how it works—well, something to that effect—and sent Sāb away on some errand. In retrospect, if I’d pressed harder then, I might have saved us a lot of trouble. But that’s hubris talking.

The Lunarite faith did not spring from nowhere. We were not the first to revere the silent and untroubled Moon. In so many faiths across Albion it has been known, for as long as any can remember, that the Moon is where Heaven’s court dwells. A peaceful place, they always say. Who or whatever is up there, it’s peaceful.

There are so many forms of the faith. Manon told me one day of the itinerant monks on her Horseshoe islands. They teach that each month, Heaven turns its face turns away in shame from our wicked deeds, but each month, it cannot bring itself to forget us entirely, and it looks again in the hope that this time we’ll learn our lesson. I told her Heaven must have a lot of patience, and she laughed a dry laugh. “Listen to you! Practically an islander already.”

In Sokee, though, they take it rather more seriously than most.

Sokee has enjoyed, by Albion’s standards, a relative degree of peace. Its treacherous mountains, sparse plateaus and carefully cultivated reputation for fanaticism have dissuaded most would-be invaders. This autarky brings with it a certain pride.

Moreover, in Sokee, the Lunarites were… almost accepted. We had monasteries. It’s not like we ran the place, in Sokee we were just one sect in a hundred, but they didn’t have that same fear that Lunarites carried with us everywhere else. In Jian, I used to think Sokee must be like a little glimpse of the coming Heaven.

Well, in Sokee, if they had one thing to talk about, it was religion. I never knew that there were so many different ways to be a Lunarite. I’d try to explain some clear, mathematical point about spaceflight, and find that my words made me a Sevener, or an Post-Antivacuuist, or some other abstruse thing. And there would go the lesson. It was maddening. We were already on the Moon. What did any of that matter?

I don’t want you to think we didn’t try. Either to pull them back to Lunar soil, or to understand where they were coming from. We were here to build a true and lasting peace. The Sokee Lunarites had thought more about how to do it than any of us, we thought, we had better listen. And, don’t get me wrong—they were brilliant. Quick as a fish, talented engineers. At its best, sharing our secrets with those Sokee kids really was divine. A way for Jian to live on, I thought.

But…