HRVST, Ch.1: A Goddess Of Night
HRVST, Ch.1: A Goddess Of Night
The Moon has many names, many forms, all inspiring longing for the heavens
Luna
The Moon was many things to man since the dawn of consciousness. We bathed for thousands of years in moonlight at night. It stirred something sleeping inside us.
It was a companion at night, with a never-ending cycle. It was born, lived and died.
At first, humanity believed the brightest light in the evening was a goddess, who was not one but many things. She lived a cycle of endless birth, death and rebirth, maiden, mother, crone. The 3 Fates, the Spinner, Measurer, and Cutter. A deity who was a trinity, made of three different beings. A three-form goddess.
She was known by so many names, Diana, Hecate, Selene, Artemis, Luna. The Moon.
The charioteer who pulled the all seeing eye of moon across the evening sky. The Mistress of sleep to give mortals rest. A deity of change, reflected by lunar phases.
Later, a huntress led by moonlight to find her prey, her symbols were tools of the hunt, the bow and arrow, quiver, and hunting knives. A fierce mistress of the wilds, so fierce, that she was chosen by the gods to be a midwife, a guardian of the future itself.
She was a slow metronome of moon light during dream-time, who powered our cycle of life. Her gravity was tethered to the rhythm of Earth’s waters, and mankind learned the meter of its waves. One day, we tested the seas, lived and extended our reach. We never stopped looking up, longing to touch what had awakened our sleeping selves.
Man was bound by karma to one world but it was not enough. The longing began long before the waters were mastered, and continued long after old gods faded. Sunlight nurtured the waking hours. Moonlight fed a waking dream into reality.
At last, we made chariots to cross the dark, and touched a light long out of reach.
LUNA, Aitken Basin Armstrong Base, Space Cooperative
“ARMSTRONG ACTUAL, FLIGHT. ON APPROACH. ZERO DOWNRANGE.”
“FLIGHT, ARMSTRONG ACTUAL. COPY. COMING DOWN THE PATH.”
“ARMSTRONG ACTUAL, BEGINNING DESCENT. FULL LIGHTS.”
“FLIGHT, WE COPY. STRAIGHT BOARD. GREEN. WE SEE YOU. PAD LIGHTS.”
“ARMSTRONG, PADS EXTENDING. TOUCHDOWN. POWERING DOWN.”
“FLIGHT, WE COPY. HANDING OVER TO FLIGHT DECK OPS. WELCOME.”
“DISEMBARKING PROCEDURE BEGINS”, said the ship.
The thick hard clunks of umbilicals. A background hiss of environmental systems softened. Some lights flickered on as others muted lower. The ship’s announcements, “ALL SAFE, YOU MAY REMOVE HELMETS, ALL PASSENGERS PLEASE FOLLOW THE GREEN TO BASE ADMINISTRATION…”, faded in ambient murmurs.
One passenger followed a green-lit drone through a sea of busy flight deck crew-workers out of the sealed landing pad. No luggage.
“Lawrence, Edward S., Captain in Space Cooperative Security Branch.
Special Services probably but never acknowledged. Not often I get a visit like this. Most of the time it’s not ‘official’, never was here, right? Most of the time I never meet special services. What can I do for you, Captain?”
The base administrator waved his hand down on the holo-stream floating above the conference room’s table, the glow of Lawrence’s file faded away, replaced by the base operations status feed that ticked off base operations.
“I need to find someone. He’s not ‘here’ and he’s ‘not alive’, but he is here, alive.”
”We have a few residents who might fit that bill for a variety of reasons. Ever since the CME, however, we’ve had our hands full. A coronal mass ejection big enough to break things down the well, also made a mess up here too, flights with bad timing, and shoddy work on surface installation did more damage than expected.”
“I was sent here, with this.”
The captain presented a card. It had an octagon drawn on it, divided into 8 slices by lines inside it. The base administrator’s eyes widened slightly, and he tried to hide it.
“The last person who saw this card named it ‘the source’. I just came up the well from meeting someone who told me that meant “the source”, from an old game, ‘Shisima’, ‘the source of water’.
In the game, you line up 3 pieces, tokens known as ‘waterbugs’. We have to line them up, 3 in a row in a straight line, with one of the pieces taking the center. You can say I’m the second piece. I was sent by the first, so I come with the best credentials.
A mutual friend sent us.”
Lawrence made a gesture with his hand at his internal cache, and waved at a wall.
A face glowed into place, a holo on the wall. It was a young woman, wearing a mix of a worn Space Cooperative jumpsuit and vest. The base administrator nodded.
“Aleksander, I hope you’re managing. You can guess I have my hands full down here.
As a reward for handling what happened to Heavyville, I’ve been kicked upstairs to Houston. I’ve realized not everything is as it seems here at HQ. I trust Captain Lawrence, just as I trust you, and trust is in short supply all of sudden.
Edward, Aleksander is a good friend. He didn’t come up the same track in the Cooperative but he’s still a real rocket-man. He warned me about what happened to the caravan inbound to Utopia Planitia, when the powers-that-be were radio silent about the CME hitting Mars.
Please help him. Be careful and take care.”
The young woman’s face disappeared. The captain deleted the file from his cache.
“Who is the third piece, the third person in your game?” The base administrator rose from his chair, straightening his blazer, and handed the card back to the captain.
“I have to find someone locked away on the Moon as his reward and punishment. He was too dangerous to keep down the well, too important, valuable to disappear.
I’m looking for Albert L’Orleans Necker.”
The base administrator sat down.
“You want him?”
Albert L’Orleans Necker. One of the founding fathers of an interplanetary age, a founding father of the Space Cooperative, the most dangerous man in the System.
This is Chapter 1 of “HRVST”, the final part of a book, “Ledger Domain”.
It begins media res, in the middle of the action but over time I’ll fill in some of the blanks. For the “whole story”, there’s a lot more written below in 3 prior installments.
Each of the prior three parts of “Ledger Domain” were written in 30 day sessions.
2062 - A History of the Space Race and A Story Set on Mars
COIN - A History of Finance and A Story Set on Earth
VIBE - A History of the Internet and Art, A Story set on “The Verse”
It’s a story inspired by the history of the Space Race, which begins on Mars, moves to Earth, through the “Verse”, and ends where it began for me, on the Moon.
Extra footnotes:
The AI image “prompt” below was used for the AI Art image used at the beginning of this chapter, which I found with Stable Diffusion search engine LEXICA
silver and golden design elements, single face portrait. complex hyper-maximalist overdetailed beautiful but terrifying, cinematic cosmic scifi portrait of an elegant very attractive but wild and dangerous witch antropomorphic female warrior god by andrei riabovitchev, tomasz alen kopera, oleksandra shchaslyva alex grey and bekinski. Fantastic realism. Extremely ornated with laced bone, branches with big thornes and green poisonous steam. Volumetric soft green and red lights. Omnious intricate. Secessionist style ornated portrait illustration. Poison goddes. Slightly influenced by giger. Zerg human hybrid goddes. Unreal engine 5. Focus on face. Artstation. Deviantart. 8k 4k 64megapixel. Cosmic horror style. Rendered by binx.ly. coherent, hyperrealistic, lifelike textures and only one face on the image.