The True Fiction of Water on the Moon

I read with interest the recent news that not a little but a "significant amount" of water has been discovered on the moon.

Yahoo News: NASA finds water on the moon
Space.com: It's Official: Water Found on the Moon

This strikes a chord with me because I once wrote a story about people marooned on the Moon. In this fiction the Moon held an abundance of water and oxygen in underground caverns, and a small amount of atmosphere in low valleys and craters, due to the many ice comets that had bombarded the moon over the eons. But I also echoed the classical and renaissance theme of the moon being the repository of all things lost from Earth. Although at the time I wrote it I had in mind Cyrano de Bergerac's Orlando Furioso (which I remind gentle readers is not about a trip to Disney World), the tradition started with Lucian of Samosata's True History, the title of which is self-satirical.

In it, Lucian and a group of adventurers are transported to the Moon by means of a waterspout, the classical equivalent of the wormhole I employed. Particularly amusing is the treatment of Herodotus and Homer being punished rather than venerated for their literary "lies." The idea of all fiction being essentially a lie and a hoax is remarkably modern.

Here then, are excerpts from my own false history of the Moon:

Luna (1997)

“But we really aren’t on the Moon, are we?” Eva asked nervously.

“It's obvious,” said Trautigan. “We stumbled onto the fake Moon set that NASA used to stage the lunar landing. And they won't just let us walk away.”

Orlando smiled and shook his head. “Poor Inchwell. He’s been trying to explain it to them for a week now.”

Inchwell sighed. “For Ms. Stranek’s benefit, I’ll go over it again. Please believe me--it’ll be easier if you just accept it.” He explained that the Moon was the place where the lost things of the Earth are found. Lost explorers and wanderers from all periods of history have appeared within a 30-mile crater in the Sea of Vapors--the ‘eye’ that appears to your right when you look at the Moon’s ‘face’. The crater had been formed by the impact of a massive ice comet, the remnants of which were still buried under the surface. The sun heated the area, releasing a thin but breathable atmosphere that lingered in the deepest parts of the crater. The atmosphere, and one’s chances of survival, thinned out the further away from the center one went.

“Bah! I don’t believe it!” insisted Gyorgy. He turned to Diana. “This makes sense to you, or is all bullshit?”

Diana thought a moment. “I suppose so, in theory. There’s a thin oxygen atmosphere on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. But I mean, just disappearing in one place and appearing in another. That’s impossible.”

Trautigan said, “You ever hear of the Philadelphia experiment? A whole aircraft carrier--poof! Just like that.”

Orlando tilted his head toward the window. “Diana, come over here.” She went over to the window with him; he handed her a spyglass. She surveyed the surrounding crater. Nothing but harsh light spread over vast, vacant steppes. But at various points she made out impossible artifacts: an aqualung, helmets of sundry wars, wooden sailing vessels fully rigged, dreadnoughts of dull grey iron, siege engines dead in their tracks--the plain was littered with them. She followed the trail of wreckage out to the horizon, where luminous mountains rose like jagged teeth against the dead maw of space.

And later, as they travel out of the crater in an attempt to find the departure point at which to escape the moon:

There they passed a panorama of lost expeditions; zeppelins crumpled like rotten melons; phalanxes of armor incorruptible; treasuries of silver shekels; cuneiform ledgers counting two thousand oxen and thirty thousand measures of corn assayed this day golden in the sun under the all seeing eye of Sammash; the lockets of forsaken loves; works lost to the eye of man: the final chapters of the Satyricon, the arm of Praxiteles’ Apollo, de Tour’s St. Sebastian Attended by Irene; ranges of mediocre poems littering the windless plain; forgotten hieroglyphs, faded syllabaries, oral traditions wayward and mute. Prehistories of technology: flints, batteries, flywheels, implements unpatented, new and useful methods abandoned, a miraculous herb for curing baldness. And wooden ships beached on the desolate silver sands, sails hanging slack in breathless heaven.

Gentle readers need not remind me that my style is hopelessly baroque and unacceptable to the disciples of the Iowa school of fictive lying.

.:.