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Summitting the Moon

By Pragathi Bala

T-7 days

The moon Landed, the Rut appeared, home equity plummeted, jobs disappeared, and Ghis liked riding the moon. It was the last item on this tragic list that her wife couldn’t accept. It was the leaf that broke the whale’s back or something similar.

“It’s the last time, Max,” Ghis said. “I promise.”

Max rolled her eyes and blew cigarette smoke out the window. The pungent vapor followed the wind back into the house a second later. On another night years ago, Max had stood at that window on a full moon night with the light caressing her profile as she looked out at the landscape with a hopeful expression. But there were no more moonlit nights, and Max was no longer the hopeful woman Ghis once knew.

“I’m not lying this time,” Ghis said.

Disappointment was etched deep like glacier-carved mountains on Max’s face. Some of this was her fault, Ghis admitted, but surely, the moon took most of the blame.

“We could have left so long ago,” Max said. Ghis caught the shine on her cheeks before Max wiped it away.

“This is the absolute last run. I’ll sell the speeder, the suit—everything,” Ghis insisted. Fear shot through her body at the mention of selling her prized possessions.

“Why did you do it? Why did you join the Flight Club and get in on this nonsense? And… for the record, such a stupid name,” Max turned to Ghis, her face set like stone. “Have you even watched the movie? It’s a satire!”

“It was named ironically,” Ghis said in a quiet voice.

Max glared at her.

“You may not be in the club anymore, Ghisara. But those people are what got you started on this… this addiction,” Max strode up to her so they were face to face. Her anger was easier to handle at a distance. This close, it was provoking.

“An addiction? What about your smokes? Have you given up? No more motherhood for you, I guess,” Ghis retorted. It was a low blow. Ghis thought she saw Max flinch, a crack in her rigid demeanor.

Max sauntered up to the free off-the-sidewalk dining table they got the first year of their relationship. She brought the cigarette up to Ghis’s face, and waved it tauntingly. Ghis rubbed her nose so she wouldn’t sneeze from the combination of smoke and moondust allergies. Max crushed the remaining cigarette into the table and Ghis winced as the coal stain marked itself on the furniture.

“Tell you what. You make this your last run and I’ll make this my last smoke,” Max said with a smirk.

And then? Her heart pounded as she waited for her wife’s next words like she was waiting for a judge’s verdict.

“And in a week’s time, we move out of the fucking Rut Zone. and then finally,  finally start a life together after.” Max’s eyes didn’t leave hers. “Deal?”

Ghis swallowed. Her promise would have to be real this time. This would be her last and only run. She didn’t have it in her to lose the only woman she loved over seeing the big blue.

“Deal,” Ghis mumbled.

Max pecked her on the cheek. “Good, well you better get back to your shed, miss moon rider. Hope this one goes well for your sake.”

Ghis moved the dinner plates from the table to the sink and attempted to wipe the cigarette stain off the table. The mark did not budge no matter how much she scrubbed; it was going to stay, just like the Rut. Ghis looked out the window towards it. There was nothing but a vast expanse of land, dotted with shrubs and lined with short scraggly trees. As land approached the horizon, it disappeared, a void that dipped before merging with the night sky.

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T-4 days

Ghis was three days into polishing her speeder and checking her engine software when she realized that she’d already done everything she could to get ready. Max, on the other hand, packed like she’d been waiting her whole life for this move.

Max submitted her resignation from her grocery store clerk job the night of their fight and had been hoarding packing supplies every day since. Today, she worked on their living room, carefully packaging every picture frame and curio into bubble wrap, then into foam, then taped the whole thing so securely Ghis wondered if they’d be moving more packaging than possessions.

Ghis didn’t want to move out of their home. They’d argued about it many times. But this time, she felt Max breaking. Even now, Ghis couldn’t bear to go to her wife’s side as Max folded up the last decade of their memories together. She walked to Max’s old home office, a room that was once Ghis’s metal sculpture studio and a while before that, almost a nursery. She couldn’t help but look towards the pastel-painted corner of the room. The paint ended abruptly as though the paintbrushes were dropped halfway through a stroke. A small shelf stood in the corner, holding gifts and unopened toys. Ghis kneeled in front of it and opened a box. The sight of the finger-length knitted socks broke her heart. While Ghis’s hobby took her to space, Max’s free time was spent at home, living alongside the cobwebs of their dreams. Ghis understood why her partner wanted to leave.

She set about packing up the ex-home office as she wondered how many times Max had looked at the shrine for their almost-child over the years. When she was done, she walked over to Max and surprised her with freshly brewed tea and a kiss. Ghis apologized in her way, and Max accepted it in hers.

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T-3 days

Low-lying clouds and a no-moon day meant a trip to the Rut was in order. Ghis cracked open a can and held another one out to Soorya. He was the one friend from Flight Club she kept in touch with after she left the group. She called him here because she needed to hear some hope.

 

When the moon began its descent, they were in denial. It looked so distant and tiny in the sky, how much damage could a golfball-sized satellite do anyway? Some asteroid knocked it off course and every week they watched as it waxed and waned larger, until one day they saw it rise and set like the sun. People on the coasts fled inland when tidal waves turned into tsunamis. The moon got closer. They saw her rise during the day and stop sunlight entirely, her shadow like a moving inkblot on the ground below. Those who lived under her orbit fled polewards. She touched the Earth with a scrape, and then a three-foot-wide ditch appeared. A few weeks passed and she turned it into a trench—the Rut. Luckily, she stabilized at a low Earth orbit. Very, very low. Oceans changed shapes, buried lands resurfaced and governments were too shattered to bother fighting over the lands near the Rut Zone.

Ghis didn’t think it was fair to call what the moon was doing now an orbit. The satellite rolled by every two days in a rumble like thunder at 930 kmh. Although no one lived directly on the moon’s path, those in the Rut Zone lived close enough to hear it.

Soorya and Ghis sat on the edge of the Rut where the mud mixed with slate moon soil to create a morose gray trough. On summer days, the reflection from the Rut could burn, but on cloudy days like these, your eyes could follow the Rut all the way down the curve of the Earth where it disappeared into the sky. A desolate roadway.

“I quit my job,” Soorya said.

“Again?”

“I know I should take what I’m given,” he said, his usually sunny expression eclipsed with regret. “But I’m not getting paid to get yelled at.”

“I’m sorry,” Ghis said. This was the way of jobs in the Rut Zone. Good opportunities came by rarely and Soorya had a particular streak of bad luck.

“Enough about me, though. You’re only here three more days! This is it, huh?” Soorya asked with a smile.

Just thinking about her next attempt as her last time made her palms sweat.

“The last time,” Ghis said, popping an antihistamine into her mouth and lifting her beer up. “Cheers.”

Their cans met with a dull clink.

“Your chances are not bad. Your rig’s in good shape and your equipment should be in top condition with all the time you spend in the shed. How about your suit?” he asked. Among all the members of the club, Soorya was the only one to have summited the moon. He held this title along with rider-with-the-most-malfunctions.

The ground began its familiar hum. If she closed her eyes she could feel the rumbling, or maybe it was her imagination.

“It’s been scrubbed and all the parts have been updated. This time I got the steel beams from Indo where they ‘make the good shit’ like you said, and sourced the chipset from Siam. They got the certifications and everything.” Ghis took a sip of her stale beer.

“Good,” he nodded.

He never summited a second time. He said that summitting felt so good he had to go again, and so he tried once more, and then again, and again, one more time, and then a dozen more. Soorya moon rode so often, he’d turned it into a habit. While the average Flight Club member tried to summit once every few months, Soorya tried every chance he could. His fuel bills were off the charts. Max spoke the truth that night; from the outside, it did look a lot like an addiction.

Ghis’s first run was the closest, strangely enough. She’d raced towards the moon at a matching pace, deployed the bungee, and timed her catapult onto its surface. The alabaster grey-white had filled her vision and suddenly she was no longer on Earth. Gravity pulled at her from multiple directions as she looked up and saw the blue sky fading dark with stars floating like a mirage. Her heart skipped. What a miracle it would be to summit on her first try. She was close, she’d just needed to make it over the hump and then it would be a smooth sail to the summit with both the moon and the Earth’s gravity helping. The borrowed engines chose that moment to sputter and her beginner’s luck ran out. Her speeder began to veer; it lost the battle with Earth’s gravity after all. She’d disengaged the bungees and deployed the wheel thrusters to push her speeder off the surface. Ghis pulled a lever and her speeder sprouted its wings. She floated her way down to a spit of a road and drove back home. She’d shared the sad news with the flight club after two days of ruminating on what she would do better next time. That one ride had been enough to make her fall head over heels. She’d done thirty more runs since.

“What was it like?” Ghis asked, her eyes refocused on the patchy grass fighting its way through the Rut dust below.

“What? Moon riding?” Soorya asked with a nonchalant shrug.

“Don’t play coy. You love telling the story.” Ghis cast him an exasperated glance. “I just need to hear it one more time.”

His face slid into a mischievous grin. “You’re right I do. It really was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Ghis groaned.

“You asked, woman. Now you get Soorya Chandersekar’s full answer.” He shook himself and sat up straight as though preparing for a theater performance. “That hump is the worst, I’m telling you. You’re experiencing all fifteen of the Gs, your bones feel like they’re tearing from your flesh—”

“Is it fifteen? I mean nine is the maximum—”

“Wait until the end to ask clarifying questions,” he interrupted with his hand up. “So there I was, draped head to toe in my speedsuit—I had already sweated through it twice over and I hadn’t even left the rails yet. I flipped the bungee warmer on and hit the engine light switch. The speeder hummed to life like it was born ready. I felt the spirit of the machine, Ghis, and it was telling me that this run was it.”

Ghis rolled her eyes; she really should have specified the exact moment in the story she loved hearing. Soorya was regaling her with the story at the speed of a full Greek epic.

“I eased into the accelerator until the programming sequence lit up. The speeder’s software took it from there. The wind ripped at the metal hull like thunder until the sound was overcome by the rumble of the oncoming moon. I blinked. You think I’m joking but I’m not. I literally blinked, and then I was under it. The catapult shot me up, the bungees deployed and the next thing I know, the speeder was yanking me upwards. Mother Earth was doing everything she could to keep me from running to the Maiden Moon. My body strained. I clenched all my muscles to keep the blood from leaving my brain. I prayed. I mean, I don’t believe in God— maybe I was praying to the moon—who knows? Guess what, the bungee held. I breathed as slowly as I could and kept working on the bungee. It was just a few hours but I tell ya it felt like I spent a month up there.”

She knew what he meant. She felt it every time she rode her speeder down and into the tracks. Her body would flood with adrenaline from the mere chance of summiting. The feeling visited her when she polished her speeder, upgraded a part, or modified her suit—it’s all she could think about. That feeling of being at the pinnacle.

“The seat belt released and I soared a bit as the Mother let go. The sky’s past blue—it’s black now. Gravity’s hold was a bit lighter, and then… it was just the moon. The white seascape as far as the eye could see, and behind you, you saw the blue beauty that let you go. There are no words.” Soorya closed his eyes as though he had the image imprinted on the backs of his lids.

“Ghis, you’ll see the sun shine brighter than her sisters. A star in her truest form without the atmosphere to cloak it. But the best happens when you look down from up there and you finally see the big blue with the Maiden Moon at its iris.”

Ghis’s eyes focused on the far end of the Rut, where she would soon be strapping her speeder into the rails.

“And then, when you’re ready, she tugs at you to return. The speeder spreads its wings open and you float that entire gorgeous way down over the New Atlantic and back on land with a different outlook on life.”

She closed her eyes and thought of soaring while the sky turned dark. To be in space gazing down at the Earth. She imagined her problems shrinking away—her life turned into a blip when compared to the vastness of space beings.

“I want that,” Ghis whispered. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted living in the damned Rut zone. I want to feel like living here was worth something. That we didn’t move all the way out here ten years ago only to get our life turned to shit because the moon decided to Land halfway through it.”

“The gear first and then the fuel bills? If you’d saved all that, we could have been out of here years ago!” Soorya said in an imitation of Max’s voice.

“Whose side are you on?” Ghis asked as she sent a peeved glance at him.

Soorya put a hand to his heart. “Apologies. My heart has and always will belong to the Lady Moon, please forget I ever said that.”

“The equipment will fetch good money on the market I think,” Ghis said, taking another sip of her beer. “You know, I hear moon riding is popular among the rich kids these days. They’re calling it a ‘vintage flight to space.’ You could make yourself a fortune teaching them.”

“Vintage!?” he scoffed. “You won’t catch me near those pesky babies. We get to do this because we have nothing else. Those kids got money, they can hire whoever they want, but it sure as hell won’t be me.”

Soorya’s jaw was set as he shook his head vehemently. He was barely an adult when Ghis first met him. She’d seen his stubble turn into a salt-and-pepper beard while the shadows under his eyes grew dark and permanent. The years were not kind to the people here.

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T-now

The living room was the frontline of Max’s moving efforts. Furniture was pushed against the wall and wrapped in protective plastic. Once flat boxes transformed into towers of half-packed belongings, while bubble wrap, tape, and stray scissors made up the minefield that was the ground. Every day, Ghis watched it like she’d watched the moon arrive—from shock to a sense of wary acceptance.

Max packed every waking hour. This was the most determined she’d seen her wife since the Landing. Ghis stepped in to help out sometimes, but Max would shoo her off and tell her to go work on the speeder instead. This move meant something more to her wife. More than the char stain on the table, more than the creaky floorboards and leaky pipes, more than all the jobs she’d lost and the friends who left her. It was infinitely more, like riding the moon.

They cuddled on the night before the run, with Max’s hair tickling Ghis’s nose and arms holding each other tight. They didn’t speak much. There was nothing to do but be patient through the eve of change.

The hum coaxed her awake that day, which Ghis took as a good sign. The kitchen equipment that escaped Max’s packing efforts looked forlorn and distant from each other. The toaster on one corner where she popped in her breakfast and the water kettle on the other end that she turned on for tea. Just like her wife, Ghis needed to know there was something better on the horizon. The hum vibrated in her mind as though in agreement, pulling at her to get into the speeder.

Ghis’s footsteps echoed through the house as she walked to the garage. She checked her suit and speeder one last time, ticking off the checklist she left strapped by the door. It was a list she ran through several times this week, and the night before. She’d run it a dozen more times before she got to the ramp. She stepped back into the house for one more look out her window. The moon’s hum droned louder and she could see its meniscus on the horizon, shimmering with reflected sunlight. She reminded herself that this really was her last run, and her last few days living near the Rut.

Her heart beat heavily under the canvas suit as she rolled the speeder into the street. She manually slid the garage door shut, wondering if it was the last time she’d be doing that. The clasps of her suit hit her wrists and ankles when she walked, and the circular metal and rubber gasket sat heavily on her collarbones. If it all went well, she might get to strap on the helmet and gloves to dust the moon’s surface. She climbed in, closed the shuttle door over her head, and drove her speeder into the Rut.

She maneuvered the speeder down a ramp and into a pit three car lengths wide and just tall enough to stand in. The Flight Club had dug it the year before she joined. Soorya was already there and checking on the oiled tracks embedded into the pit, salvaged steel from defunct train routes; Ghis had helped lay them. She latched her speeder’s take-off beams to the tracks, her mind already on the next steps in her checklist. Soorya asked something about rocket fuel but she couldn’t hear what he said. She ran through the engine status checks and ran a machine test one last time.

Ghis finally stepped away from her speeder a half hour later, satisfied that all her checks yielded normal results. She found Soorya waiting, his hands clasped patiently.

“This is it,” she declared.

“No, it isn’t,” Soorya said. “This isn’t it.”

The moon began to loom in the distance and Ghis turned her head to watch the approach. She would have to get going in fifteen minutes.

“Yeah, yeah, the moon will be here soon enough. But this isn’t it for you, Ghis. You have more than this. You got Max. You got us. You got a future to come back to after you do this.”

Would they be able to see the moon where they were moving? She seized on the sorrow that flitted through her mind. She would miss seeing the moon. She would even miss the Rut. She’d miss Soorya and the club she’d stopped going to. Her eyes prickled as she realized that she loved this place as much as she hated what it had done to everyone who lived here.

“I know,” Ghis said, wiping her eyes. “I know I do but… but I need this to know for sure.”

Soorya’s eyes took on a note of understanding as he nodded.

Ghis heard cheers in the distance and squinted toward the edge of the Rut. A small group had gathered there and were waving their arms.

“Max organized it. She wanted it to be a surprise for you.”

Her throat closed up. “They weren’t supposed to be here.”

“You’ll make it this time. I know it,” he said before jogging up to join the rest of the group in cheering her on. Ghis waved back at them.

She stepped into her speeder one last time on Earth and strapped in. She switched on both her fuel lines and stared at the dials before her. The software behind the monitor was awake and counting down the time before her launch. There was nothing she could do now except wait. Her speeder was programmed down to the millisecond. She breathed in and out, slowly counting down with her clock, 3, 2, 1, 0. She stopped thinking. The metal beneath her clicked and the ignition shot her back into the seat.

Her speeder held steady to the tracks as the rocket fuel accelerated it to match the surface speed of the moon. Ghis continued to breathe, watching the second timer counting down how long it would be until her path and the moon’s intersected. The moon barreled towards her for twenty long minutes, its shadow leading the way while its edges glimmered from the eastern sun. Ghis blinked and suddenly she was gazing up at the belly of the moon.

The rocket fuel put out its final burst, pushing her speeder’s acceleration to the brink. Ghis’s body shuddered with the speeder. The panel counted down her proximity to the catapult. She waited until the last second before yanking a lever to disengage the fuel buggy from the speeder. A moment later, the catapult took hold of her vehicle and shot her straight out of the Rut  parallel to the moon’s surface. Her bungee kicked into gear and latched onto the moon just above her line of sight. She cranked the wings open part way and steered to straighten the speeder whenever it veered. The tension on her bungee cords began to loosen. Her acceleration matched the moon’s. The machines had done their part, but there was still plenty that could go wrong.

She drew in the cables, reducing the slack but not completely landing yet. She hadn’t made it over the hump, the infamous midpoint on the way up to the summit where she had last lost control of her speeder. She felt the pull upwards increase as the Earth’s gravity eased. The moon was inviting her up.

Ghis might just make it out of the Rut. Her spirit soared. Acceleration hit her gut again as gravity switched and combined into both the Earth’s and the moon’s. She was past it. She was past the hump. Tears blurred her sight.

The last five years were a never-ending nightmare where both Ghis and her wife took turns jettisoning dream after dream. Her speeder was rounding the three o’clock point on the moon headed towards noon. They were close to paying off the mortgage and started saving for their first remodel together. Max was trying for a child and they wanted to build the perfect nursery—gone.

Her bungee held, so she tugged on it to get closer. They’d gotten halfway through building the kid’s room when the Landing wrecked the last of their savings. Max lost the baby and they couldn’t afford to try again. So Ghis turned it into a craft room where she would make and sell metal sculptures—gone.

Her speeder did not veer. There was no market for sculptures at the Rut. Max turned the spare room into a home office, saying she wanted to focus on her career to get their savings back. That was until she got fired from her copy-editing job. Any hopes of saving up enough for a vacation far from the Rut—gone.

Ghis ratcheted the bungee taut once more. She worked in steps. Check the acceleration, check the speed, check the slack and then pull the ship closer. Check the acceleration, check the speed, check the bungee—the nose of her speeder touched the surface.

She was here.

An hour later, she watched the Earth rise. Her suit was anchored to the moon just like her speeder was. Her first wish when she stood upright on the moon was for a picnic blanket, a snack and Max by her side, maybe even a bottle of wine. She laughed at the absurdity of it. But it told her enough. Ghis marveled at the stars and the shape of the galaxy. She saw the moon redraw the ocean beneath her and the new lands it uncovered. She felt herself take a deep breath, feeling calm in the way she hadn’t let herself feel in the last five years. Her old life, ruled by the Rut and littered with broken dreams—gone. Her new life, on the horizon.

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Host Commentary

By Mur Lafferty

Pragathi has this to say about the story:

“I originally envisioned this as an adrenaline-packed tale about a ragtag bunch of youths, but as is always the case with my stories, I quickly veered into writing about sad existential thoughts. In “Summiting the Moon”, I explore how we deal with events beyond our control and make empowering choices despite them. This story pulls from my immigrant experiences and those of my parents in how we sought meaning in a life riddled with difficult and emotional decisions.”

For me, what stuck out here was the dystopia/class warfare story of “we don’t have much, but we can at least chase an adrenaline high.” But as many of these kinds of story emphasize, sometimes you have to grow up and stop chasing that adrenaline. When you have other people who depend on you—and I’m talking anything from emotional to monetary to protection—You have to take them into consideration. What is more important? Adrenaline or your family?

It’s never an easy decision. And a lot of times the character has crafted a solid sense of self connected to the adrenaline practice and feels as if they are leaving a part of themselves behind, and didn’t their family love them for who they are, adrenaline junkie and all? Ultimately we are reminded that love is complex, and not just a binary, all encompassing thing.

But I think everyone can identify with the sense of almost succeeding at something, coming close so many times, but still not making it. I think that creates the sense of “just one more time,” the feeling that maybe you’ll actually get it this time, and then you can put the obsession to bed.

The last time, I promise.

Our closing quotation this week is from Thomas edison, who said Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Thanks for joining us, and stay safe, stay kind, and have fun.