3.1
21 March
St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery
Shoemaker-Faustini Plateau
Lunar South Polar Mineral Territories
My Dearest Father Bertram,
Is it strange, to be the abbot of a place that hangs above you in the sky? You are so sorely missed in this, my chosen exile, as you breathe fresh air not from canisters and walk beneath blue skies. Blue! Already it seems incredible that any sky would dare so bold a colour.
It is I, your most humble Brother Michael, writing to you from the third hydroponic module, which we jokingly refer to as the Greenhouse, since it has been modified to grow, beneath its pink and blue diodes and opaque, non-glass ceiling, things that actually sprout from dirt. Our food supply comes, much like that of Nevada’s hippy Burners, from plants grown in water troughs and bathed in our own bodily wastes, but our future comes from the—well, I almost said “earth,” but of course this is regolith. More anon.
May I call you dearest? Although your title is Fa and mine is Bro, I think we both know that my feelings for you—unrequited though God requires them—be neither filial nor fraternal. Although one must observe, “Platonic” is hardly the word for it either, since Plato was assuredly a practicing member of our little club. But if love must dwell separate from physicality, must it also dwell in silence, or shall it, in private letters, dare to speak its name out loud? For dearest you are, and shall remain, as should surprise no one.
Your missive addressed three urgent interrogatives, which I shall endeavor to answer as thoroughly as would a corporate functionary called upon the carpet by his superior to answer for actions deemed unauthorized. I hope to persuade you of both my diligence and my frugality—two qualities thought useful in a man of my position, although I recognize it matters more how such things land than how they’re cast. And so we shall see, nicht wahr?
As to the question of “why in heaven’s name shipments of water have been halted when we’ve got eight new brothers prepping for launch,” you are wise to inquire. It’s true that proximity to the ice mines of fair Luna was the primary concern in selecting the site for our moonastery. However, what Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station (or Moonbase Larry, if I prefer) doesn’t advertise is that their water (like all such) is eighty-nine percent oxygen, whereas the rocky Moon herself is forty-five percent, and as my gran would say, them economics don’t rightly square. Truly not.
As irony would have it, among the many apparatuses and apparati sold to us by Larry Killian’s merry band there sits an emergency oxygen generator that, when hit with fabulous amounts of electricity, reduces a shovel full of sand into a pail of oxygen and a fused brick of elemental silicon, plus a little bolus of slag for which no use has yet been found. The process requires methane, but returns it intact, and so costs nothing but electrons, with which we are liberally supplied.
Listen: the bricks, if stacked, will vacuum weld most impressively into an airtight wall of rainbow black, like the feathers of a raven, and it turns out the emergency oxygen can be breathed by God’s servants even in the absence of emergency. Or (as Sir Larry no doubt regrets) reacted with still more methane to produce the very water we neglect to purchase, though it be plentiful and close at hand. This may also answer your second question, namely, “why the frig are we having tanks of methane soft-landed from orbit?” I trust that frig is now clarified sufficient, for what I’m doing is simply cheaper, by a factor so considerable that, should your thoughtful attention turn toward it, may be found persuasive. And yes, and yes, Sir Larry Eddie Killie himself fairly protests that his oxygen generator isn’t meant for such hard duty. I do hear him, and yet a moment’s calculation tells me we can buy a new generator every three months and still come out ahead. Whose fault is it that moonwater costs more than expensive machines?
And so one is forced to ask, as we settle into this lifelong, life-shortening task of figuring out how humans can live as happy extraterrestrials: are we in it purely for the good of the future? Shall we shore up the local infrastructure at greater expense to God’s church, or shall we go thriftily into tomorrow with a cheat from Orlov Petrochemical? I await, with eagerness, your counsel in such matters.
As for question three, I am having so damn many seeds shipped up (and thus nearly erasing the aforementioned savings) because hydroponics is a losing game. Every gram of food grown in sewage is grown of atoms born on Earth and merely recycled. It admits no participation from Luna herself or, if we buy aqua vitae from Sir Lawrence, no participation save that million-dollar glass of water.
And so it makes sense, to me at least, that most of my personal kilograms hauled moonward were allocated to the seeds of Earthly plants, that I might discover what groweth in the soils of Our Lord’s other creation. And a ghastly endeavor it was, for kilogram after kilogram perished badly, ere I found what adornments Luna would permit on her skin.
The soil smells like gunpowder, or the dried-out dust of a mineral hot spring, and this reeky sulfur (being roughly two percent of the local regolith by weight and ninety-nine percent by pungency) doth slay the nitrogen-fixing bacteria I also transported. And so I found I must be satisfied, in the beginning, with plants that fix the nitrogen themselves, for there is no nitrogen, and I mean none, in the soils of Lune. This, too, must come from Orlov Petro, as I thought was well explained to His Holy at the very beginning of this venture. Here at my elbow (and also at my knee, for quarters are tight) Brother Giancarlo, being a Vatican astronomer by former profession, attests to such, although in the shuffle of this and that, we can perhaps forgive its forgetting. It is, after all, the least visible and reactible component of the air we breathe. So yes, I am also having tanks of nitrogen dropped from the sky! Mea culpa, Bertram, I thought at least this one portion of the endeavour would not surprise you. Apologies if it were not explained with sufficient oomph to penetrate a human skull.
In any event (or perhaps not in any, but in some), I can now report seed-to-seed growth of four fixers, being (by common name) blue lupin, sweet clover, bird’s-foot trefoil, and alfalfa. As it happens, although the lupin is known mainly as an ornamental flower and secondarily as a weed, its seeds are a sort of bean and, though bitter, a delicacy in ancient times, and still today in some parts of the world. Bird’s-foot trefoil is an inaquatic relative of the lotus, whose flowers, while non-nutritious themselves, have an antispasmodic effect on the digestive tract and can thus improve the absorption of other nourishments, thereby wringing extra calories from any meal into which they’re sprinkled. Alfalfa sprouts are edible, as any Nevada Burner or Vancouver hippie could tell you, and while calorically poor, are a source of vitamins B and C, the latter of which may be quite difficult otherwise to acquire in a land without fruit trees. Sweet clover is inedible, alas, but (as our mass spectrometer insists) pulls more nitrogen from the air and into itself than all others combined, and so earns a place as a servant of Saint Joseph.
Once these proud pioneers have grown and gone to seed, I remove them from the soil, and weigh them, and then bake the moisture out of the soil and weigh what’s left, and the difference between that and the starting mass is the Gain—what the plant hath wrestled free of Luna to become, for the first time in eight billion years, living matter. And dearest, if such an alchemical transformation is not called a miracle then I don’t know what possibly could be. I am humbled beyond words (yes, I! Wordless!) to be even present for it, much less participant.
And then! Bertram, I then save the seeds from these plants and grind the rest back into the dust, making of it an alien humus that can sustain less hardy crops, that need their nitrogen prepackaged in organic forms. Like a dried-out skeleton, the Moon has plenty of calcium, and like a rusted old sportscar it has plenty of iron and magnesium. No shortage on these fronts! Compared with Earthly earth it’s deficient in sodium and potassium, though, and we find here that carbon is but one part in a hundred thousand of the soil. Of all the tested nitrogen fixers, these four plants, then, are the ones that take their carbon most efficiently from the CO2 we brothers exhale, which comes ultimately from Orlov’s methane and Killian’s emergency oxygen. And so, even mixed with the corpses of clover and lupin, our soil remains lethally starvaceous to most of what grows back home. Any farmer who found himself parked over such impoverished dirt would surely sell out to developers and see it converted forthwith into suburb! Of course you will ask: Could I not fertilize the soil by pooping in it? Indeed and of course, if I only desired to invalidate the whole experiment. The question is, what grows here, not on the atoms of Mother Earth we bring here with us.
It matters to me, and I like to think it matters to Our Father Who Art, that OP’s methane and nitrogen come not from Earth but from near-Earth asteroids, and that they also become alive here beneath our humble roof. Might not this greening be an ultimate purpose for which God created Adam afirstplace? I do like to believe we’re at the beginning of history, here, as one with the first neolithic goblin-men to scatter seeds deliberate and harvest what they planted, and that the future (though they know us not as individuals) will subsist on the crops we here develop.
(In Ages Middle, toward the end of Ages Dark, monasteries not only trained friars and priests in their childhood letters but, by preserving and endlessly copying the manuscripts of Ages Roman and Greek, whilst nurturing strange crops and livestock the world had forgot, became civilization’s sole experts on many aspects of ancient life, including sanitation and medicine, and formed the nuclei of colleges that would blossom into the world’s great universities in Ages Renaissant. Is it vanity to dream of future days here in space, where the Church plays such a role again in the secular lives of human beings? Surely this thought drives His Holy and the most generous donors who back this monastery, or why else indeed are we here?)
There are further steps to the growing process, or precursors, rather, for we have to grind the soil to make it safe to bring indoors. Imagine, if you will, that it has lain unweathered in the sunlight for more years than there are humans alive, and each teaspoon is basically a trillion-strong pile of microscopic stone arrowheads that would tear us up inside if we let them. And tear the plants up, too, most likely, unless they have cellular repair mechanisms we ourselves do not. But if we grind the regolith too fine, it becomes airborne too easily in the low gravity, and if too coarse then any water we pour into it slides right through, as through a column of gravel. For posterity, please know that a hundred-micron average particle size does the trick of being soil.
And so, with ground, hydrated, nitrogenated moondust in our greenhouse pots, we have seed-to-seeded another subfraction of nature’s bounty. What grows, you ask? Spices, for one. We have, for example, field mustard, whose seeds become the yellow stuff you spread on hot dogs, and whose leaves are as edible as kale, with a slightly peppery kick. Also blue stonecrop, which is astringent and makes a good salad dressing, and French marigold, a relative of cloves and cinnamon whose petals resemble saffron in both color and flavor. Also marsh thistle, which gives up a sweet syrup, and given the appetite for sulfur within the genus Allium, I remain hopeful that either onions, shallots, leeks, chives, or garlic can be coaxed to grow as well. So please, yes, send these seeds above all others. As for food crops, there are several that grow but refuse to flower, but we can reliably get seeds back from tomatoes, rye, wild carrot, and garden cress.
Can you see, dearest, the beginning suggestions of a Lunar native cuisine? Already we’ve served a tangy rye pasta with a sort of red-orange lupini sauce like nothing you’ve ever tasted, along with a salad of greens and shredded carrots, topped by a citrusy drizzle of pulverized plant matter. Delish! And all of it won, atom-by-atom, from the rocks of an unliving universe, feeding into our bodies matter that has never touched the Earth. And so, bit by bit, morsel by morsel, we become Lunar and asteroidal, leaving Eden behind to the meek, who shall indeed inherit. And if food tastes better when the diner is camping, rest assured it tastes better still when seducing a dead planet to join forces with the living. If there be a greater calling for any human life, I confess I know it not and seek it never.
My darling I am, very yours and very truly,
Brother Michael Jablonski de la Lune
***
Dear Mike,
Your pomposity, while hilarious, does indeed teeter dangerously on the brink of vanity. I will consider your letter a private confession of this sin and will ask you, in your morning prayers, to add a daily plea for forgiveness. Please resume ordering water from Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station. You can cut the order in half if you like, but the goodwill of Harvest Moon Industries in general and Sir Lawrence Edgar Killian in particular is at stake. The Vatican relies on goodwill more than you seem to realize, and at the moment the Church appears to be serving as an important bridge between corporate and government interests on the Moon. You do not exist in a vacuum, my friend, and yes, that’s a joke.
As for being the abbot of something that hangs above me in the sky, it may interest you to know I not only smile warmly at the Man in the Moon when I see him winking down at me, and think of you guys standing there on his chin, but I’ve added an app to my glasses that shows me the position of the Moon at all times, including when it’s located behind the ground underneath my feet. So my thoughts are with you and your brothers constantly. Frankly, so are everyone else’s; this is one of the highest-profile projects the Church has ever undertaken.
Thanks to generous donations, your seeds are on their way, and should arrive by the end of the week.
With love and kindness,
Fr. Bertram Meagher, Mdiv
***
My Dearest Father Bertram,
Harvest Moon’s public relations gaggle needs to learn how to read a map; Shackleton was the name of their proposed base at Shackleton crater, fully four hundred kilometers from here. Since the UN denied their mineral claim for that site, deeming it of greater scientific than commercial interest, the base has instead been constructed along the promontory between craters Shoemaker and Faustini. The new claim is quite a bit larger than the original request, covering both craters lip to lip, with a kilometer-wide strip of land in between, along which they have bulldozed a road. They don’t need a road, you understand; they simply want to mark the place up so the brochure photos look impressive. For the same reason, I have asked them to bulldoze a driveway to St. Joseph’s, which sits a little over a kilometer past the boundary of their claim.
The Chinese, meanwhile, have bribed their way to ownership of nearly the entire North Polar Mineral Territory. One hopes they’ll bring a balance of men and women there, for it does seem odd, that here at Saint Joe we have a pile of men, while ESL1 has a floating swarm of women with, somehow still, a man in command of them. Of course, of the billions of women who exist, Renz Ventures selects only those dozens who don’t find this too problematic, and yet, strange are the tides that segregate the children of Adam and Eve in this way, and strange is the future ahead, if others should follow suit. Danny Beseman and Sir Lawrence both have a better track record of gender-blending, and one hopes that Mars and Luna, respectively, will benefit therefrom, and yet they still are the fingers of a man’s man’s world, reaching upward into heaven in a way the Creator does not command nor, presumably, endorse. From the confines of our crater there is little we can do about the patriarchal plight of women, but I can at least write you, Bertie my love, of my concerns on the matter.
In any case, the Mandarins can keep the north pole as far as I’m concerned, for while the overall water content is greater there than here, at the opposite end, the concentrations are lower, whereas each of Sir Larry’s craters holds a cubic kilometer of ice so clean that an intrepid astronaut could very nearly strap on skates and a tutu and start tracing out figure eights. I can hear the sprightly dance music already!
You should know, if only for the sake of intellectual rigor and emotional rectitude, that if you blow kisses to us upon the chin of the Man in the Moon, you’re more than two thousand kilometers off the mark, for we stand in truth upon his left cheek, like hairs upon a mole.
Oh, and by the bye, could you check on something urgent for me? Since we do not own the mineral rights to the land on which we sit, by my reading of the Reformed Moon Treaty, we’re in violation if we invite the boys from Moonbase Larry over to dine on native cuisine, but not if we feed them earthstuff grown from our own shit. Is this accurate? It seems rather rude.
Very yours and very truly,
Brother Michael Jablonski de la Lune