Chapter 10: The Flight to the Moon
Chapter 10:
The Flight to the Moon
The Flight to the Moon
B
EFORE THE MOON
returned to Earth’s sky, only one person in all the world had crossed the Longinus Curtain and approached it.
But when she saw the Earth’s pale companion, she gasped.
“What is that?”
To say the moon had changed wouldn’t begin to describe the sight. The moon she saw before her didn’t fit with any of her previously held knowledge.
First of all, the moon was clearly closer than it should have been. Second—
It looks like it’s swollen to the point of bursting!
The moon’s diameter had grown to over 1.2 times its previous size, its orbit dropping toward the Earth. And these changes were still in progress. Due to the constant changes to the moon’s trajectory and the force of its gravity, Eva-02 Allegorica’s AI had to continuously recalculate Asuka’s entry.
“So large…” Asuka remarked to herself. “So near.”
Countless fissures ran in ripple-like patterns across the moon’s surface—this was especially easy to see on the dark side—revealing fire below.
Did something crash into the moon and create those burning fissures?
Or were they made by something bursting up from below?
Part of the surface had even melted and swirled about in convection currents.
So unexpected and shocking was the sight that Asuka wondered if
something was wrong with Unit Two’s display. Her deep blue eyes tried to find the truth within the infinity focus. She even felt the impulse to go outside and look for herself.
The moon was supposed to be cold and geologically still, or so Asuka had been taught. Sure, some of the moon was thought to be warm, a residual effect of its original heat, and possibly the repeated impacts of the asteroids and comets that had formed its seas. It contained a core, a mantle, and a crust, but no plate tectonics. The moon’s topography remained unchanged across vast spans of time. Disturbances were generally limited to the expansion and contraction caused by the sun’s heat, and the only moonquakes were tidal in origin, the Earth tugging at its satellite from its fixed position in the sky.
That was how it was
supposed
to be.
But now, everything Asuka knew had been upended. Her first instinctive reaction was to complain.
“C’mon, can’t you give me a break?”
“If what I’m seeing is real,” Asuka said to herself, “then surely they must be seeing this from Earth, too.”
The moon’s transformation was so extreme that anyone looking up would have noticed, even with the naked eye.
According to the Eva’s measurement logs, the moon’s cataclysmic change had begun immediately after Asuka burst through the Longinus Curtain. But now, still shaken by Ayanami Cinq’s death, Asuka nevertheless tried to look at the information from every angle to find a better explanation. One answer came—rather than the moon suddenly undergoing this radical transformation, Asuka, having passed through the curtain, now saw what had been hidden.
“If we haven’t been seeing the real moon from Earth, what
have
we been seeing?”
As outlandish as the thought seemed, there was data to back it up. Asuka had been attempting, unsuccessfully, to establish communication with Tokyo-3. In fact, she couldn’t communicate with anyone on Earth. If this moon was being seen from Earth, that would mean that visible electromagnetic radiation was passing through the curtain from the moon’s side to Earth, and she should have at least been able to piggyback some kind of transmission on those waves. But none of her attempts had gone through.
“Has the Longinus Curtain been showing us a lie?”
At least the radio silence didn’t necessarily mean that the Earth had been wiped out. That possibility had been among her fears.
Well,
she thought dryly,
I still have one thing to look forward to.
Then she realized that if the Longinus Curtain
had
been hiding the truth, the people on Earth wouldn’t have been able to observe Eva-02’s successful passage across the barrier. To Shinji, in Nerv Japan, Asuka and Cinq would have
both
appeared to have been killed by the lance.
Has he given up on me? Or is he still betting on my survival? When I get home, I’ll make sure to drag the answer out of him.
She imagined the scene.
“You jerk! You didn’t believe in me?
”
“No, Asuka! It’s not like that!”
And then she’d make him look up at her and say everything she wanted to hear. It was going to be so satisfying.
Asuka knew that her lunar expedition had become a one-way trip. But that kind of thinking was liable to break her. Instead, she directed her thoughts on all the reasons she needed to make the return.
On her cockpit’s display, an auxiliary window showed an image of the Earth, where her communication laser was locked on.
“That Earth is a lie.”
Asuka had another reason to doubt what she saw on the curtain’s surface, besides the communication blackout. For reasons she didn’t understand, the Earth behind her appeared unnaturally darker than it had on the other side.
She knew that the people down on Earth would be coming up with plans of their own. So she, too, must do everything in her power. The moment she stopped moving forward would be the moment the impossible hopelessness of her situation broke her apart. Already she could practically hear herself snapping.
Focus on the job.
“So large…” she repeated. “So near.”
She wondered how far from the Earth the moon was now. Without a reliable reference point on her home planet, she couldn’t make a particularly accurate measurement, but the planetary satellite seemed to have crossed its former perigee of 350,000 kilometers.
“I wonder if it’ll hit,” she said, meaning Earth. “I suppose I could ride the moon back down.”
But if that happened, the world would certainly have reached its end.
Would the moon deliver that final, crushing blow?
Whatever was going on, she was witnessing something beyond the ordinary.
The moon… The moon is…
The moon felt violently alive, with hot blood flowing within it.
The moon is not dead.