Ravin's Ramblings

Abby pushed a stray lock of thick black hair behind her ear. The rest stayed securely in its pony tail. She looked out of almond shaped eyes from under a heavy fringe of bangs at the place she would call home for the next four weeks. The Zoeng Wing of Luna City had a pleasant mezzanine gallery from which to view two of the other six wings of the complex and the entire southern expanse of Maria Tranquillitas. Most important to Abby, as she made her way through the crowd of gawkers, workers, scientists, and tourists, to the front of the gallery, was that in exactly two minutes she would see her very first earthrise.

The view out the massive floor to ceiling transparent wall showed the Arthur Annex and the Kapur Wing extended at sixty degrees like giant white tubular arms ending in bubbled domes of reflected gold. Abby never let the significance of a moment pass and to her, the archaic and efficient architecture looked welcoming; outstretched as if to embrace the Earth, or the future, or progress, or maybe all three of these. Well, at least Zoeng Corporation’s version of them. Also viewable, though not as close was an entirely different looking building. One whose graceful spire and delicate seashell fractals made Luna City look clumsy and overbearing by comparison.

Independent of any corporate conglomerates or government pacts, the pristinely elegant spire of St. Ignas Monastic Retreat’s cathedral Prima de Luna, jutted out of the rock face a kilometer or so away from the complex. Abby could just make out the words Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam gleaming a bronze that would never tarnish in the sunlight and arched around what looked like a large stained glass window. It looked like a stained glass window if you only glanced at it, but upon closer inspection you could see the fluidity and organic motion of the solar winds ionizing on the surface of the entrance. Unlike Luna City’s brute force method of keeping its population safe behind layers of protective tiles and plates, Prima de Luna employed the more modern magnetic shields that were unavailable at the time of Lunar City’s construction. The result was stunning. Like God’s breath fogging up glass church doors, creating its own celestial aurora. Off over the horizon, a half sphere of marbled blue and white and brown was just resting over the tip of the cathedral.

Earthrise didn’t happen like a sunrise back home. The moon rotated at a much slower rate than the earth and therefore always kept one side facing home. A constant vigil, watching ice ages, the come and go of dinosaurs, the rise and fall of empires, and humanity spring forth on tiny flickering candles they called rockets. It cared not whether you were on time for work or who was elected to office. It was here, where it had always been in humanities memory, still relatively pristine even as the creeping fingers of progress clawed their way across the surface.

There was no magnificent fiery ball peeking up over the horizon slowly climbing higher in the sky. For all it appeared from Abby’s perspective, the moon stood still while the Earth spun like a gigantic slow top. Earthrise was the slow crawl of the terminator as the earth moved during it’s natural rotation…and this was the first time she would watch the sun’s light creep over her home from the other side.

Abby’s fingers curled around the guard rail as she tamped down a little crescendo of excitement. She was here, watching the earthrise. Watching earthrise! She made it. Incomprehensible that she should be here, yet here she definitely was, gazing at things she’d only seen in documentaries. For the first time in her life, she was off Terra Firma and staring back at it.