The shadow fell quietly. It arrived without pomp or circumstance, without heralding its arrival. There were no radiant, heavenly beams, no tapestries of color smeared across the sky. It simply descended, a frigid blanket on the surface, a dark shroud formed by the movements of celestial bodies. Forehead pressed against a hexagonal pane, Chun glared at the darkness.
Night came quickly on the Moon.
Chun took a step back from the translucent walls and lowered herself to the mossy floor of the Great Dome’s garden. She felt the chill of night creep across her skin, and she stretched out her arms, dragging them across the plush surface. The motion stimulated the bioluminescent bacteria growing within the moss, illuminating her silhouette.
She took a breath and tried to lie perfectly still. The glow faded, absolute darkness enveloping the dome for a brief, encompassing moment before the artificial lights flickered on.
“I thought I might find you up here, Changchun.”
Chun jolted upright, grinning, to find her aunt standing next to the water bear statue guarding the ramp. With graceful strides, her aunt crossed the garden, hands tucked inside the silk robes of a priestess.
“Whatcha looking at, little one?” Chun’s aunt asked, the moss thrumming as she lay down next to Chun.
“The darkness.” Chun replied.
“Maybe you’ll encounter the guardians,” Chun’s aunt whispered. “It is said that during the lunar night they will make themselves seen to those who know how to look.”
“Auntie…” Chun rolled her eyes, expecting to see her mother’s older sister smirk as she often did when cracking jokes. But her aunt was still, silently searching the vast darkness beyond.
“Auntie?” Chun said again. Her aunt blinked, as if awakening from a trance.
“Come on little one, let’s go wash up for supper.”
Chun peeked through a slim opening in the yurt’s curtain door.
“Dion!” she whispered, sizzling with excitement. “Dion, wake up.”
She was answered by a long yawn. “Chun?”
Chun swept into the yurt and gave the hammock a shake. “Dion, you have to get up. We’re going to find the guardians.”
Dion sat up, sleep-disheveled hair settling into place.
“My auntie told me it was possible, just last night.” Chun tugged on Dion’s arm, helping him to the edge of his hammock.
Dion gestured to a set of rods leaning against the wall. “Braces,” he said.
Chun handed them to him, then turned her back respectfully while Dion assembled the exoskeletal supports. He’d ask if he wanted help.
As she waited, Chun’s gaze drifted over a world of warm shadows and comforting darkness, yurts and groves illuminated by bioluminescent algae growing within the walls, solar-powered lights providing a backsplash of artificial illumination where needed. Ropes suspended between terraces intermingled with vines and dangling mosses among canopies of broad mushroom caps and ferns jutting into the empty spaces between platforms. This world, deep inside one of many artificial craters carved into the Moon generations ago, was blanketed in subtle radiance.
Chun watched lifts rise and fall, some transporting people or cargo, others existing simply for the sake of rising and falling, converting momentum into energy through regenerative braking. It was enough to power the stacked superconductors that generated the gravity field. Not quite Earth gravity, but close enough, as long as you stayed within the mine shaft. Chun didn’t fully understand how it worked, but she knew it was important. Everyone did. Of course, even with bioengineering advancements to reinforce the skeleton, being born into such a world could sometimes take its toll.
Chun heard the click as Dion snapped the final neural-sciatic conductor into the peroneal linkport set into his ankle. “Help me down?”
Chun helped steady him and he slid out of his hammock. Dion landed on the moss-padded ground with a soft thud, then gave his legs a shake as the system finished calibrating.
“Okay,” he said, brushing down the last wayward hairs on his head. “Where do we start?”
Chun peered at the carvings covering the shrine gate. She bowed her head and stepped through, holding tight onto Dion’s hand. “Auntie?”
Chun’s aunt turned from the altar she was cleaning. Dion bowed as deeply as his braces would permit. “Madame Longyou.”
A sly grin broke at the corner of Auntie’s lips. “Changchun. And Monsieur Chauvet. What can I do for you both?”
“Auntie, tell us about the guardians. Please,” Chun said. Auntie tapped her chin, then gestured for them to sit. As Chun helped Dion onto the ground, her aunt flicked a willowy mushroom on the shrine. It began to glow, setting off a chain reaction through the rest in its colony until the entire shrine hummed with soft light.
“The water bears are the guardians of our people,” Auntie began. “And always have been, having arrived here on a ball of metal and fire long before our people ever lived in these caverns. Their spiritual energy prepared the Moon for life, and through their work, they became the guardians of all living things in this place.”
“Even us?” Dion asked, eyes wide.
“Even us,” Auntie nodded. “So, we honor them by living in harmony with all the plants and mushrooms and insects and bats of our caves.”
Dion and Chun looked at each other, mouths agape. Finally, Chun turned to her aunt.
“Where can we find them?”
“The guardians are all around us.” Auntie waved her hand in a broad arc.
“Auntie,” Chun mumbled, twirling her finger around a stray piece of hair. “We were hoping we could see the guardians… before the move.”
Auntie leaned down and took Chun’s hands.
“Then you’d better start looking.”
Auntie refused to give them much else to go on, apart from a single piece of the priestess’ wisdom: it was not a matter of knowing where to look, but how to look.
And so, Chun and Dion agreed that the best place to begin their search was at the bottom.
Down the lifts they went, passing shrines and sacred pools.
Down the lifts they went, passing people tending wild orchards, children flying kites from the edges of the terraces, grandparents playing games of chance with the younger generations and, through this, instructing the youths in the tradition of honoring one’s elders.
Down the lifts they went, arriving at the base of the cavern. Here stood the first temple, carved into the solid core of the moon by ancestors. All things in their world trickled down to this place.
Chun helped Dion from the lift and the two walked single file through a garden of lichen-covered rocks, crossed the arched bridge over the reflecting pool with its sightless fish, and finally removed their shoes before entering the temple of the water bears.
Chun lit a rod of incense and placed it on the altar. “For the ancestors.”
Dion held up a rod of incense in offering. “For the cave.”
They both bowed their heads. “For the guardians.”
“Show us how to find you,” Chun whispered.
She opened her eyes and watched the smoke twist and twirl up through the cavern.
Chun took a small vial from the temple, as was custom. She dipped it in the pool of the guardians and held it up to the light to inspect it.
“What should we do now?” Chun asked.
Dion lifted his face, eyes searching for the last wisps of smoke. “I felt them, Chun, the spirits of the guardians.”
Chun filled another vial and handed it to Dion. She tied her own vial around her neck.
“But we didn’t see them,” Chun said. She looked around the temple garden. “What’s a better place to look than this? This is where everything involving the guardians begins.”
“Where it all begins…” Dion repeated, and a smile crossed his face. “Follow me.”
Back up the lifts they went. It took several transfers to reach their destination, but eventually the pair arrived at a dim platform tucked into a remote corner of the cavern. Chun felt her hair flutter in the quiet breeze that breathed from the crevice in the wall. Windchimes lining the gate dinged like a prayer. Chun and Dion grabbed a set of algae bio-lanterns from the shrine gate and ventured into the tunnel. They ducked at the sounds of bat wings fluttering overhead as they followed the thrumming glow of their bioluminescent lamps. Finally, the tight corridor gave way to a sprawling antechamber. And there, coating the walls, were sketches of bats and mushrooms, humans and water bears, the history of their people in ochre and charcoal.
Chun’s wide eyes traced the images of her ancestors arriving on the Moon, packed into cramped quarters on the surface. “Indentured” was the word her auntie used to describe them, these miners who only ventured into the caves to strip bare the resources within. In other scenes, she saw those ancient miners rebelling against the corporations. Sterile mine shafts blossomed into a system of interconnected caves, wild orchards for her people to migrate between, terraces filled with life. But before all of that, depicted amidst a mosaic of handprints, were the guardians arriving on a still-empty Moon amid fire and steel, lying in stasis, their spirits preparing the Moon until they were reawakened by Chun’s ancestors.
Dion reached out and touched the wall, placing his palm against the red-stained impressions of ancient hands. “The guardians are here, Chun. Their spirits are here, in this place.”
Chun placed her hand next to Dion’s. Feelings again, not proof.
Water bears danced throughout the frescos, present throughout the entire history of her people. It was all there, except for the one thing she was most desperate to learn. Not one panel revealed the secret of making the guardians seen.
Still whispering his confessions of faith, Dion turned his lamp. The water bears faded into darkness. Chun’s gaze shifted with the light, fingers trembling and pupils flaring as the lamp illuminated new sketches, figures wearing the ceremonial outfits of her clan, robes billowing with weightless fabrics. Chun heard her aunt’s voice in her mind:
“Our ancestors first moved into the mines as an act of resistance. They connected the caverns and traveled throughout this labyrinth, using their mobility to fight the corporations. The Moon sheltered them, and they nurtured it. After the rebellion, our ancestors chose to remain nomadic so that we would never forget our relationship with the living and spiritual ecosystems of the Moon. But once every 33 years, with the realignment of the solar and lunar calendars, we migrate not through the tunnels but over the surface. The Procession is our way to honor the Moon and the guardians, to remember how fragile life is and that we must remain active in our care of it.”
“I can’t believe this lunar night we get to walk the Procession,” Dion said. He clutched the vial of water from the temple of the water bears around his neck.
Chun turned her head from the wall and scowled into the darkness of the cave.
Dion ran a hand through his hair and looked out from the terrace, eyes tracing all the ground they had covered. He gave the strap on his leg brace a tug.
“Chun, we’ve tried everything,” he said. And he was right. From the Great Dome to the tunnel gateways leading into the adjacent caves, they had searched. They had sat in dark corners where it was said voices of the past still echoed; they had prayed in the temples of the ancestors, and they had meditated among ferns at shrines of the cave spirits. They had ridden every cable car, had utilized every lift, had passed through gregarious communal yurts and had tiptoed around secluded nurseries where human babies and young plants were nurtured together. But they had not seen the guardians.
As he had been in the water bear temple and at the cave paintings, Dion remained resolute in his faith. At every place they searched, whether sacred or mundane, Dion professed the same sense of connection, the same confidence in the water bear spirits as the guardians of life in the caves.
The more Dion asserted this faith, the more irritated Chun became.
“There has to be more we can do.” Chun squeezed her eyes shut. “We have to find the guardians, Dion. I need to see them.”
“Chun,” Dion tried, rubbing at the exoskeletal port on his leg. “It will be okay.”
“No, it won’t!” Chun snapped with such fury that Dion froze, eyes wide, the words left in him strangled by the tightening at his throat.
“It won’t be okay,” Chun grumbled. She turned her back and stomped off, leaving a still-petrified Dion standing at the edge of the terrace alone.
Even draped in shadow, the lunar dust glistened like a taunt. Forehead against the windowpane, Chun glared at the Moon.
“I thought I might find you up here.”
Chun did not turn.
“Changchun, you know better than to abandon a friend,” her aunt’s voice was closer. “I found Dion on a terrace four levels from his family yurt, with his legs about to give out from overextending his time in the exoskeletal braces.”
Chun felt a stinging at the corner of her eyes. She felt her nose twitch, her ears burn.
“Changchun,” her aunt said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“How do you know the guardians will protect us? Out there?” Chun managed to spit the words out.
“Ah, so that’s what this is about.” Her aunt lowered herself onto the mossy floor of the garden, igniting small bursts of light. Chun joined her, hugging her knees, and the two sat in silence, observing the darkness beyond.
“I was much older than you, my first Procession,” her aunt broke the quiet. “And I was very scared.”
Chun looked up, rubbing her nose. “Really?”
“Oh yes! A priestess never lies,” her aunt nodded. “I was terrified. But I did it. I walked through the airlock with my people, and together we crossed the face of the Moon. I have moved between caves many times since then, through the tunnels, just as you have, but I have never forgotten that Procession. Nor have I ever felt that same connection with the spirit of the Moon. It is something I will carry with me for all time.”
Chun bit her lip. “I thought that if I could just see the guardians before the Procession…” Her voice trailed off. Auntie glanced over her shoulder at the water bear statue guarding the ramp.
“Hmm,” she tapped her chin. “Follow me.”
Taking her aunt’s hand, Chun allowed herself to be led from the walls of the Great Dome and back into the cavern. They took a lift down, crossed in a cable car, and arrived at a place Chun had never been. Her mouth fell open and her eyes bulged at the test tubes and vials, the potted plants, screens and wires poking through ivy and lichen. She always wondered what it was like, the lab where the priestesses worked when not maintaining the temples. A tinge of guilt sparked in the back of her mind as she thought how much Dion would love this.
“Let me see that vial around your neck,” her aunt said, brushing aside a few ferns as she pulled a microscope off the shelf.
Chun reached for the small capsule from the sacred pool. She had almost forgotten she was wearing it.
Her aunt opened the vial, tapped a single drop onto a small square of glass and slid it under the microscope. She looked through the eyepiece, adjusted a few nobs, then leaned back and gestured for Chun.
Heart pounding in her throat, Chun placed an eye to the microscope. At first, all she saw was a haze, blurry outlines moving like bubbles trapped under water. Then, as her sight adjusted, some of the figures began to take more discernible shape. Small dots zipped back and forth in undulating motions, while others squirmed and slithered like snakes. But among this fascinating menagerie of impossible things, Chun saw the unmistakable bulbous torsos, the eight legs, the segmented bodies.
“The guardians,” Chun whispered, watching the tiny creatures dance, masters of this microcosmic domain, this universe contained within a droplet on a microscope slide.
“I told you the water bears would make themselves seen if you knew how to look for them,” Chun’s aunt said. “Do you understand now? The guardians are everywhere, even in a single drop of water, invisible and yet ever present. And just as they have watched over you here, so will they be waiting for you in the next cavern, and so will their spirits guide you there. You need only the faith to believe that life in this place, fragile though it may be, can grow wonderfully.”
In the days that followed, Chun helped her family pack their yurt, as they had done many times before, although this time, their belongings were loaded into special carts built to traverse the lunar surface. Her aunt helped her atone for her mistreatment of Dion through a purification ritual at one of the sacred pools. Chun had been sincere in her apology. As unwavering a friend as ever, Dion was just as sincere in his forgiveness.
One the day of the Procession, Chun soaked in the algae bath that would protect her skin from the radiation and extreme temperatures of the surface. She dressed in the appropriate formality, robes dripping with ribbons that would soon be afloat in the limited gravity of the surface, slim space suit and helmet adorned with symbols of her family, her tribe, her guardians. Beneath it, the vial from the sacred pool was still strung around her neck.
One of the priests struck a gong in his hand. Chun looked down at Dion. As the exoskeletal braces could not be exposed to surface conditions, Dion was secured into a hover chair, which Chun had requested the honor of escorting.
The gong chimed again. Chun felt the vial against her collarbone and looked out the windows of the airlock. The spirits of her guardians would guide her. On the other side of this journey, her family would still be with her. Her people would still be with her, stewards and caretakers anointed to honor the beautiful fragility of life in this place. And the water bears would be there, waiting. The gong rang a third time. Chun squeezed Dion’s hand. The airlock doors began to open, and she smiled.