Welcome Home, Artemis

 

They sent the probe on a scouting mission of sorts to circle the moon and head off any possible problems with the manned flight to come.  It had been fifty years since the last mission and they did not want to leave anything to chance.  There were those who thought it unnecessary but when the anomaly appeared the naysayers had to eat crow.  Not that anyone was keeping score at that point when it simply became a matter of collective bewilderment at what they were seeing on their screens.

What the probe discovered was kept at the highest security level to the degree that even the four astronauts slated to make the trip were kept in the dark.  The director of the Artemis III mission was hoping it was a computer glitch but with each orbit of the moon the damn thing kept being where it should not be.

“What do you think it is, Jim?” his colleague and second-in-line-for-his-job  asked, hoping the older man’s experience already had it figured out.

“I don’t have a clue, John.  It’s white.  It’s there.  And then it’s not there, like a goddam mirage.”

The planning for this mission had been extensive and expensive propelling their stress into the stratosphere if they could not keep on schedule and pull it off.  A few phone calls later and the decision was made to modify the mission to include identifying, if not exploring, the thing that shouldn’t be there.

***

“Mom!  Joey hit the back of my foot!”

Diana’s mind was elsewhere.  As the commander of the Artemis III mission and the only female on the team she had to be at the absolute top of her game.  Details of the mission and possible negative scenarios were playing out in her mind while attempting to maintain some type of family normalcy.  The two worlds were at odds and had her feeling schizophrenic with a split between the mundane and the potentially sublime.

“Mom!  He did it again!”  

She stopped and turned abruptly on the two small boys with their dog in tow.  “OK you two, if you can’t walk nicely with the dog maybe we should just go home and you can sit in your rooms?”

The boys began talking over each other to plead their cases when she suddenly sensed a kind of presence in the nearby yard or possibly a shadow that was out of place in her peripheral vision and triggering some subliminal warning.  The hairs on her arms stood up as a prickling sensation moved up her fingers to converge at her neck and then down her spine.  She made eye contact with the quarreling boys and slowly placed her forefinger on her lips to signal quiet.  Her look and gesture were so odd they immediately complied.  

She felt her breathing slow and then deepen as she turned her head.  In the middle of the adjacent yard not more than twenty feet away was a large apple tree heavy with fruit and standing beneath it in shadow was a magnificent antlered buck.  It stood stock still like a statue staring intently at Diana.  Partly in awe and partly in terror she took in its well-muscled torso and array of sharp points.  Time seemed to stand still as she felt her chest rise and fall, rise and fall, with a feeling of near-weightlessness.

By some miracle the dog had not yet sensed the presence of the deer and Diana’s mothering instincts took over as she grabbed her sons’ hands along with the leash and moved them quickly down the sidewalk and away from the tree.

***

Jim paced the conference room and the thought occurred to him that not too many decades ago everyone would have been chain smoking and filling ashtrays.  Now he had to be content with chomping on gum that had lost its flavor.  

“OK, we are going with plan B.  The landing site can be modified to put our team of four down near the anomaly.  We are not getting any readings concerning for radiation of any kind and it may be some kind of complex optical illusion but the higher-ups want to know what it is and a military specialist has been added to our landing crew replacing one of the four.  No one is super happy about that but it is what it is.”

An excitable post-doc who was new to the mission couldn’t help himself, “Will he be armed?”

Jim was not in the mood for it.  “Yes, he’ll have a bow and frickin’ arrow, Dylan!”

Undeterred Dylan pushed it further, “How about a bowcaster like Chewbacca’s?”  A few laughs but mostly groans came from the others in the room.  

“If you want me to go Darth Vader on your ass keep it up.  Otherwise we need to get to work,” and he dismissed the room.

***

“And the moon be still as bright” echoed in his head lying in the darkness.  It was the voice of an elderly man reciting it in a sonorous tone that seemed to bounce around in a large empty room.  Ryan felt his body lifting off of the bed and he could not move his limbs.  In the small reserve of rational thought preserved in his half-sleeping brain he knew this was his sleep paralysis that he’d been careful to hide from those evaluating him for the upcoming mission.  The floating sensation continued as he began observing himself from above, his body moving through the ceiling, then the roof, motionless and rising faster and faster while still supine in the night sky.  The light from a full moon somewhere behind him threw everything in stark relief.

His awareness suddenly shifted to another house in a nearby neighborhood.  He found himself in a room where a woman was shutting off the light to the bathroom and walking towards her bed in a long translucent nightgown.  The edges of the gown flowed in a slow undulating motion like she was underwater or… on the moon.  A soft glow surrounded her which reminded him of a marble statue of a Greek goddess he’d seen in the Louvre during his college travels.  By some indescribable dream logic he could feel his blackness deepening in response to her whiteness.

She appeared to sense his presence and looked to the ceiling where his awareness hovered.  Her eyes widened and he recognized her as his mission commander.  Something powerful seized him and rended him violently and he awoke with a start, his sheets soaked with what he thought must be blood but was sweat.

***

The day arrived and the astronauts of the Artemis III Mission assembled.  Ryan was the odd man out as he had been added late to the mission and the man he replaced had been a beloved colleague of the other three.  The two other male astronauts offered him little more than a polite indifference that he reciprocated, but Diana’s visage burned with a kind of intensity that drew his attention though he tried to hide the fact by constantly shifting his gaze around the room.  Failing that, he stared at the floor.

Jim barreled into the room and addressed the team in what appeared to be a parody of a mini-motivational speech which he ended by wishing them good luck and godspeed.  Guilt was eating at his portly edges since it had been decided to keep them in the dark about the anomaly until they were descending to the lunar surface.  The risks of the information leaking was just too great and had the potential to complicate everything from geopolitical alliances to the price of eggs on grocery store shelves.  He trusted Diana to be able to be flexible and yet keep a tight rein on things when the time came.

The astronauts secured their gear and headed to the top of the rocket that would catapult them into space and facilitate a rendezvous with the unknown.

***

The anger in the lander craft was palpable when word finally reached them of the anomaly.  

Suddenly the feelings of awe and anticipation shifted gears and changed quality as unnamed fears began proliferating amongst the crew as they realized they were descending towards something that was unknown to them even a few minutes ago.  Diana found herself at a loss for words but then her training kicked in and as leader of the mission she felt she needed to take control and ask the questions.  “Mission Control, this is Lunar 6.  Please repeat, over.”

“Lunar 6, this is Mission Control.  You are descending towards an anomaly discovered six months ago on the moon’s surface.  It appeared to be a white structure on initial sightings but whenever attempts were made to clarify what it was by zooming in with our cameras it ceased to be where we initially saw it.  This has been a repeatable and frustrating phenomenon, over.”

Diana could barely believe what she was hearing and she fought to keep her composure.  “What is the mission in light of this information, over?”

“Orders are to approach the area with extreme caution and report back what you see, over.”  

 

Diana cut the coms a bit too quickly in her irritation and turned to the others.  “You heard the man.  Let’s land this bird and see what there is to see.”  She felt like she wanted to throw up.

They detached from their orbiting craft and began the descent to the lunar surface, eyes glued on the growing gray terrain below.  No one spoke until they touched down and the disembarking procedures were verbalized and followed in robotic fashion.  

***

Walking on the actual surface of the moon with its lighter gravity intensified the feeling of sleepwalking and posed a real threat of dissociating from reality considering the circumstance.  Diana felt it for all of them and realized as their leader she must focus and ground them.

Her voice sounded stronger than she felt.  “Let’s keep it tight.  We have to find the…” her voice caught in her throat.  Not more than fifty feet away there stood a white house that had not been there when she’d started talking.

Ryan felt himself tense up in a fight or flight response, “What the hell?”  One of the others, he thought it was Glover,  teetered back and began to fall in slow motion until his rear end hit the ground and threw up a spray of dust-like particles.  

“Glover!  Are you OK?” Diana asked with rising panic in her voice.  It did not sound like her voice and frightened her all the more.  He did not respond to her but just sat where he fell and stared at the house.

Diana turned her attention back to what must be an apparition of some kind.  It was a white Victorian style house but not quite so.  Tree-like tendrils grew out of it in odd places and at odd angles.  She heard a rustling noise though there was no wind blowing and she was surprised to find herself walking towards it.  Alarm bells were going off somewhere deep inside her as she looked down to find she was wearing flats and a dress with a plate of chocolate chip cookies in her hands.  Steam was billowing off of them in the bitter cold lunar atmosphere.  She jerked her hands back and the plate flew up end over end like a flipped coin and the cookies fell slowly in all directions.  

What Ryan saw was his commander walking towards the house and then suddenly jerking as if waking up from a bad dream.  He tried to regain some normalcy by signaling her with her call sign but to no avail.  As she advanced on the house he quickly closed the gap between them and grabbed hold of her arm.  

At that she turned her face on him and he saw the glow from his dream surrounding her.  An itching sensation began at the top of his scalp and quickly became unbearable as he felt something pushing up out of the top of his head.  Antlers suddenly shattered through the top of his helmet and he began screaming as he released Diana’s arm and staggered backwards.  The two other astronauts were now down on all fours and galloping towards him with what sounded like baying and howls coming through the coms.  As the air quickly escaped from his suit he had the wherewithal to pull the firearm he’d concealed in a side pocket and fired it at them hitting both but not before their momentum sent them barreling into him.  Blood droplets drifted to the ground like a lazy red rain and mixed with the regolith as the wounded astronauts clawed at Ryan’s suit and hammered at his shattered helmet until death took them all in a human heap.

Diana was unaware of the carnage transpiring behind her as she continued to advance on the house in a kind of daze.  There was a growing familiarity with what she was seeing but on  a deeper level she was experiencing it as wholly other.  Her inclination was to run towards it but also to run as far away as possible.  In spite of these warring impulses her momentum simply carried her forward and up the stairs to the porch.  The door stood ajar and behind it she sensed a pulsing darkness and limitless space.  She paused for only a moment and then stepped over the threshold as a voice echoed through the chambers of her mind, “Welcome home, Artemis.”

***