Mare Crisium

TIMELINE: AUGUST 17, 2017. FOUR DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

Máni isn't back yet.

That's not entirely unusual: Máni isn't the most dependable god in the pantheon, never has been, and this latest incarnation is even more inclined than the last to lingering in the everything beyond the gate when it's his turn to shine. Chang'e, who was set to meet him upon his return, can't help thinking she'll be relieved when he retires, and hopes his general dislike of fruits and vegetables will hasten that retirement along. She feels a little guilty for thinking that way—they're supposed to be a pantheon, a team, and she doesn't want to be the villain of the piece—but he doesn't take his duties as seriously as he's supposed to, doesn't seem to really care about their sacred task, and without it, they might have faded the way so many other incarnations have.

She shouldn't judge. It's not like she was here in time for moonrise, when she should have escorted him to the gate with all proper pomp and circumstance. But she'd been distracted with a translation paper, and time had slipped away from her. She'd grabbed her things and raced for the gate, half-convinced she'd get there to either find him standing impatiently outside, or worse, to find Diana waiting to tell her that due to her negligence, the City had been forced to find another way, and their services were no longer needed. That would be the end of them all, if it were ever to come to pass.

After all, gods aren't natural forces, not like Summer and Winter; they're fractured reflections of natural forces. They don't necessarily endure. The ones who perform an essential service get to stick around, vestigial remainders of a time when belief had been bigger and easier, a time before the alchemists began tying everything down to a single system of understanding, turning people into weapons to wield against anything that wasn't the reality they wanted to control. The gods without an essential service…

Gods can be forgotten. Seasons can't. Oceans can't. But gods… gods are only ever here to go.

Maybe once there had been a true incarnation of the Moon, just one, singular and serene. But much as the Summer and Winter appear on every continent of the world, distinct from one another, shaped by the climate and conditions of the land they serve, the moon shines down everywhere, and people look up at it everywhere, and everywhere, those people looked at that moon and formed their own ideas about what it represented. Some of them saw men and some of them saw monsters and a surprising number of them saw rabbits. Incarnations are born from belief in the beginning and inertia in the end, and all over the world, the Moon fractured into smaller shards of itself, faces, and where there's a face, there will be someone to wear it.

And everywhere there were people, the moon continued to shine. The moon, celestial body that she was, didn't care how many little incarnations spoke for her, how many people were empowered in her name. She only needed to shine.

In the beginning, all the shards of the Moon served their own pantheons, walked among the people who truly believed in them. Chang'e would never have known Máni in those days, would never have been forced to deal with his casual refusal to take his job seriously. She would have been a part of the celestial bureaucracy, organized and occupied and, quite probably, completely miserable. She may not like how lackadaisical Máni is about things, but she doesn't like to be micromanaged; she's happier here.

But time passes, and gods fall out of fashion. Oh, everyone remembers the Zeuses and the Odins, but she can't remember the last time she heard T'ou-Shen Niang-Niang invoked outside of a scholastic paper. Shitala has greater staying power, having diversified her portfolio. That didn't save her cognates. So far as Chang'e knows, only the lunar gods still have a fully intact company, a pantheon made up of refugees from dozens of others, and it's all because they have a job that transcends human belief, keeping the universe wedded to the idea of them as it isn't necessarily wedded to everything that calls itself divine.

Which Máni is screwing up.

Until he shows up for the handoff, she's stuck in her divine form, unable to step down without violating propriety, meaning she's the goddess of the moon and immortality and peach harvests before she's a linguistics major, and that's going to fuck her day eleven ways from Sunday if she doesn't get out of here soon. She's supposed to be meeting with her advisor in a little over three hours, and since her advisor doesn't really understand why she refuses to take classes with the best linguist in the world—most linguistics majors at Berkeley are here for Professor Middleton at this point, and while she can't blame them, she wants to attract his attention about as much as she wants a bad case of pubic lice—that's not going to be a fun meeting.

It gets even less fun if she shows up glowing pinkish gold and sprouting seeds wherever she walks. Academic advisors are primed to deal with a whole lot of weird as part of their daily lives, but they have their limits, just like she has hers. And one of those limits is never allowing herself to be alone in a room with Roger Middleton. It's a small thing. It's getting harder every year; he'll probably be head of the department before she's ready to graduate, and then she'll need to find an excuse to switch schools, which is going to be hard to do without sparking rumors of inappropriate behavior on someone's part. She's still at the beginning of her academic career, and she doesn't need "was inappropriate toward a professor" haunting her for the next twenty years. As for starting the rumor in the other direction…

She shudders, still watching the gate. The Moon always sets in the west; Máni should be coming from that direction once he gets his feet back under himself and gets reacclimated to the idea of having feet. That's one of the hardest parts of the adjustment, learning how to exist as a concept instead of a body, how to endure when there's no beginning or end to you, any more than there's a beginning or an end to moonlight. Still, he's been doing this job for six years now, and he knows the drill. He knows the drill, and he has the gate key, which he has to hand over before either one of them can stand down.

Chang'e has been doing this job for almost a decade, starting when she was sixteen and started hearing whispers from the moon at night, and probably continuing for the next hundred years. She's not ageless—no one ageless should incarnate before they turn twenty-five—but thanks to her peaches, she's the age she wants to be, and if not for her degree, she'd already have frozen herself in place, stopping where her joints are at their best and her bones can bend more than they break. Still, the need to graduate was drilled into her early and often by her parents, and while they're not with her anymore, she supposes she owes it to them to finish the task they gave her before they left.

Máni is one of the most frustrating people she's ever worked with, and if it were up to her, she'd knock him out of the rotation. And she knows he'd say it's because she's a man-hater—she's not—who doesn't want to work with any male Moons, as if at least half of the Moons she has to deal with weren't men. She wants him gone because he's bad at his job, plain and simple, and no one who's bad at their job should ever have access to the Impossible City.

The Impossible City isn't a place: it's a concept, an idea, an ideal at the center of all things. She supposes, on some level, that it's Heaven, the single Heaven that binds all pantheons that have ever existed, the perfect place to which they all aspire. It isn't a place, but the moon isn't a person, and so it's somewhere that can be gone to, a location that isn't a location, a contradiction wrought in masonry and glass. The Impossible City is the center of all things, the spoke around which their wheel spins, slow and stately and unstoppable. Alchemists, those humans who dream of controlling the universe when everyone who knows the universe knows it's the other way around, have tried a thousand ways to access the City, a thousand methods of breaching the walls and making it their own. They believe it will grant them godhood, give them power over everything, and the worst of it is that they may not be wrong. Take the City, take the concepts of creation. Control it all.

But as the City is and is not a place, there are certain rules around it. Chang'e knows people live there, walk its streets, breathe its air; she doesn't envy them. She likes cable television and delivery services and coffee from the cheap gas station near her apartment. She can't imagine they have those things in the City. She doesn't know where the residents come from, or how they live, or whether they can leave. There's a lot she doesn't know, but she knows this:

The City is a place that isn't a place, and that means day and night pass there, time melting hour after hour into days, weeks, months, years. The Impossible City changes. And when night comes to the Impossible City, the moon doesn't shine, because the moon can only find real places. So the Moon shines there instead. All the lunar deities who have ever become incarnate, taking their turn at crossing above those iridescent streets, those towering spires. They continue to appear in the real world, even when they lose all believers, even when they slip from the historical records, because the City needs a Moon.

Máni was the Moon last night. He missed his last two shifts, passing them off to another divinity with a smile and an easy promise to fill in for them one day, but this time, he wasn't swift enough to get out of it. She knows he went; if he hadn't, she'd know that too, by now. All she has now is waiting.

Máni is never happy to sail above the City, but he understands the importance, and he's always gone willingly enough. Chang'e begins to pace before the gate, checking her watch, watching time slip away, future becoming the past, plenty of time becoming incipient tardiness.

There's a shout from the other side of the gate. She stops pacing and steps closer, peering over the threshold into the everything. To someone who wasn't a Moon, it would look like nothing, like the void, but for her, it's a shaft of silver moonlight shot with rainbows, each textured with every possibility the universe is considering and rejecting, millions of sparks of color per second, most guttering out without even an echo. And there, in the middle of the corridor, is Máni, walking toward the gate.

He's moving slow, slower than he should be. He's a big guy, attending school on a football scholarship, fond of hitting the gym and hitting his teammates with almost equal enthusiasm; even when he's tired, he isn't slow.

Then he takes another step forward, and she sees why he's moving so slowly. He's carrying someone, body curled like a comma, limbs dangling limp and heavy. Another step, and she sees the long cascade of wheat-gold hair draped over his arm, tangled and, in one spot, matted with what looks like dried blood mixed with mercury. She shudders but doesn't step away. She's wondered, a few times, what would happen if one of them was hurt while they were fully incarnate, stepping into the space between human and abstract idea, creatures of light and belief capable of shining down on the Impossible City without being struck dead by the sight.

Apparently the answer is "the one who gets hurt bleeds moonlight along with the normal red stuff, and dies anyway." She's not sure she wanted to know that.

Máni stops just before he reaches the gate, putting his burden down on the shimmering silver-bright ground. The body that was Aske rolls a little, face turned upward, and her eyes are open, blue and blank and unseeing. She was a goddess. She had only just learned that she was a goddess. She should have had decades to shine, to discover the limits of her power, before she faded.

She shouldn't have died. But Chang'e can't look at her and pretend she's not gone. Her chest doesn't move; she doesn't blink; there's nothing left of Aske but meat.

"What…?" Chang'e asks, looking away from the corpse, fixing her attention on Máni. "How?"

"I went to the City like I'm supposed to," he says. There's blood on his hands and smeared on the front of his shirt, still gleaming silver. It hurts to look at. "I went to shine. But when I got there, Aske was on the ground in front of the window, and the window was wrong. There was a… a trail, behind her, like she crawled there."

Chang'e swallows hard and looks at Aske's hands. True enough, the girl's fingernails are split and broken, her fingertips gleaming silver-red. She dragged herself to the window that allows them to enter the Impossible City somehow. How, Chang'e can't imagine.

"I didn't want to leave her there," says Máni. "I couldn't leave her there. But I had to shine. The light was building inside me, and it hurt. I had to leave her while I crossed the City sky." He looks at Chang'e, and there are tears in his eyes. Sweet Moon above, he looks like he's going to cry, and Chang'e doesn't know what to do with that. Maybe if she could step down into the mortal woman she is when she's not a Moon, she'd know, but the gate is open, and she's stuck as she is until it's closed. "I had to leave her."

"I'm so sorry," says Chang'e. "Come through the gate."

Máni looks at her like she's a monster of some sort. "I can't just walk through the door with a dead body, Judy," he snaps.

"Judy isn't here right now," says Chang'e. "She's in the waiting space until you come through the gate."

"Still a dead body," says Máni.

"Yes," says Chang'e. "I'm sorry, but if you can't carry her through the gate, you'll have to leave her where she is. Tomorrow's gate will be elsewhere, so she's not going to be in the way."

He stares at her. "That's… How can you even say that!"

"Very easily. I speak seventeen languages fluently, and I can say that in any of them." Chang'e looks at him calmly. "She's still stepped up into her incarnation. Even if you didn't worry about being seen carrying a dead white girl across campus, how would you explain a dead white girl who bleeds silver and glows in the dark? Her divinity needs to pass before she can be moved through the gate."

"Can her divinity pass if it's not in the human world?"

"An interesting question, and one we should probably put before our elders," says Chang'e. "Please, come through, so the gate can close and the hour can pass."

Máni glares at her before he finally, belatedly, steps through the gate. The tunnel into everything on the other side trembles, shaking like a clothesline in a heavy wind, and then the gate is gone, and the place where it was is only the blank granite wall of the Campanile, the great bell tower that virtually dominates the campus. It was severely damaged in the earthquake almost ten years ago; the granite facing was only restored to the sides earlier this year, completing its long and intricate repair. The gate anchors here roughly once a month, which is convenient, if a bit more exposed than Chang'e prefers.

The gleaming silver blood on Máni's clothes and hands remains, a scrap of the incarnate world carried over into this one, and the sight of it is unnerving and exciting. This is something new.

The gate is gone, but the process isn't finished. Chang'e holds out her hand. "Key, please."

Máni looks at her with disgust but reaches into his pocket and produces the key, which is the same silver as Aske's blood. His fingers leave red smears on the metal, completing the likeness. Chang'e takes it and slides it into her pocket, bowing her head in acknowledgment. He doesn't return the gesture.

There is a shining light in the air around them, glitter dancing in the watery beams of the rising sun. As the key finds its place at the bottom of her pocket, the glitter fades, and the light fades with it, and they finally step down from their divinity, two shining figures becoming two twentysomething college students. Anyone who sees it happen will dismiss it as a trick of the morning air, a mirage, and it's both those things, but it's also a reality, as so many mirages are.

"The fuck, David?" asks Judy.

He raises his hands, showing her the blood on his fingers. It's visible against his dark skin in the dim light because there's still silver threaded through it, bright and impossible. "I can't believe you made me leave her there," he complains.

"Okay, as we've tried to make you understand, I didn't do that," says Judy. "Chang'e did that. We're not the same as our deities, we're more… the reflections they cast when they aren't using the energy to manifest."

He rolls his eyes. "I was here first."

"Debatable. But: if you saw a corpse, would you be able to bring yourself to pick it up and carry it back to your dorm? And even if you could, would you be able to go and do a full shift at your job first, knowing the body was there?"

David blanches. He's a dark enough man under normal circumstances that it doesn't show as much as it might, but he normally looks a lot healthier than that. How he avoids getting a tan when he spends half his time on the football field, Judy may never know.

"I don't know how I was able to just walk away from her like that." He looks over his shoulder at the wall, which shows no traces of the gate. "I just left her there."

"No, Máni did," says Judy. "You need to get a little distance between you. You'll be able to do this a lot longer if you can. We can't go around being gods all the time. Thank you for bringing back the key; I'll go talk to Diana this afternoon. Do you want to be there?"

"I have practice," he says, quickly. He's afraid of Diana. Most of the new incarnates are. She's the only one a lot of them have heard of before they encounter the whole pantheon, and while she's not the most powerful of them, her name gives her a certain reputation that Judy can't decide whether she wants to envy or be grateful she doesn't have to deal with.

"Okay," she says, shrugging. Then she looks at his hands again. "When you wash up, be sure to use bleach."

"I didn't kill her," he said.

"I know. This isn't about destroying the evidence. It's about making sure the alchemists can't use it."

"Oh. Right."

There aren't many alchemists on campus these days. New gods still need to learn good habits, like not washing traces of divinity down communal sinks. She sighs as she turns away.

Time to head for her advisor's office and begin dealing with the mortal, mundane day. God business can wait.

After all, what's the point of being a living face of the Moon if she still has to hurry?