When the Moon Hits Your Eye

by John Scalzi

Wapakoneta, Ohio | The Armstrong Air and Space Museum

“That’s our man,” Bud said. “Maybe,” Virgil allowed, unconvinced. The man wasn’t doing anything but standing there, staring into his phone. Unless he had secretly hidden cunning spy technology into the back of his hoodie that could melt and reform Lucite in seconds, and replace a moon rock with a similarly-sized chunk of possibly modeling clay, all this dude was doing was blocking the camera.

“It’s amazing,” he confirmed. “What I can see of it. The sunset itself is blocked by a Waffle House and a McDonald’s.” “You’re missing out,” Emily said. “And it’s not just the sunset. The moon is absolutely stunning.” “You can see the moon?”

Emily was right. It was the brightest sliver of a crescent Virgil had ever seen. Even with the sun still in the sky, the moon was clearly, almost relentlessly, visible.

“And you’ve already lost me,” Heffernan said. Dixon cleared her throat and tried again. “We have a bunch of mirrors on the moon.” She paused to make sure this was understood. “We shoot lasers at them for science. Yesterday afternoon the mirrors stopped working.”

“Forget it. Explain to me how the moon is three hundred miles closer and yet somehow not three hundred miles closer. Small words.” “It grew.” Heffernan blinked at this. “The moon is rock. Rocks don’t grow.”

“No one is claiming victory for stealing the moon,”

“Not a great week to be a scientist or a believer in a rational universe.” “I never believed the universe was rational,” Clyde said. “I’ve lived in it too long for that.”

“All I know is that when the government is trying to convince you the moon is suddenly made from something that comes out of a cow, you should question it.” “It could be goat cheese,” Dave said. “Dave, I will dump your coffee onto your head, I swear to god.” Dave wiggled his mug by the handle. “I’m out of coffee.” “Then I will get you a refill and then dump it on your head.” Kathy turned her attention back to Clyde. “Omelet, extra cheese, wheat toast.” “Yes, please.”

“I know why she feels that way,” Clyde said. “We are confronted with a seemingly impossible proposition, that the moon has turned to cheese. And we live in an age where disinformation not only exists, but is actively used as a tool by pundits and political parties.” “Listen to him, he’s sound biting again,” Alton said to Dave.

Just because we want an explanation—just because we need an explanation—doesn’t mean the universe is obliged to provide one.”

“It doesn’t matter how smart we are, if we can’t explain how the moon was replaced by a globe of cheese. In this respect, we are no different than a dinosaur, or a whale, or a spider, or a paramecium. It’s an unknowable phenomenon.” He stuck the omelet in his mouth.

“I’m a former philosophy professor. We’re professionally not sure of anything.”

Now, I don’t know how many of you squeeze cheese [laughs], but if you do it long enough and hard enough, you’ll get liquid out of it, which will be mostly water, plus some other molecules, like fats and proteins. When these geysers erupt, we can do spectral analysis. And the spectral analysis tells us: cheese.

“Imagine two people,” Bardfield said. “One who has lost love in their life, taken by the hand of death. Another who thought he had real love, but found it was something less than what he had expected and hoped for. The two of them, bereft of love, and of the miracles of life. And then the unexpected happens.” “The moon turns to cheese?” Hannah ventured. “Well, I was thinking about the finding of love with each other, with the moon, in its waxing phases, representing the growing miracle of their affection. Not that the road to the love will be that smooth, mind you.”

Everyone Wants to Know: How Can I Eat the Moon Cheese? Spoiler: You can’t and it probably wouldn’t taste good anyway.

“Our lunar samples are not currently available for inspection.” But if they had turned to cheese, would he want to eat one? “I like a good aged cheddar as much as anyone,” Gable said. “But the moon is over four billion years old. That might be too aged even for me.”

with honor, humility and dignity. Q: What would you say to the other billionaires who have space companies? A: Just this: Hey, Elon and Jeff? Ha ha hah lol suck it, dudes.

“This is what happens when the moon turns to cheese,”

“So do I,” Felix concurred. “I still think it’s weirdly sweet. Two brothers, bitter enemies over a thing that doesn’t even matter anymore, even as their wives are fast friends. Running cheese shops across the square from each other. It’s almost Shakespearean.” “Did Shakespeare write about cheese?” “If he didn’t, he should have.”

To cheese or not to cheese, that is the question.’” Felix groaned. “Please never say that again.”

“When you spend your whole life thinking one way, and the universe takes a hard right from that way of thinking, I think it’s all right to step away for a little while to get your bearings again. So I told my department I’m taking a break. Of course, that means now I don’t have my stipend anymore.”

“I mean, yes. Moon turning to cheese is a real thing and it shouldn’t be, and I guess if I spent any time thinking about it, it might freak me out, too. But at the moment, I’m trying to pay bills and thinking about two brothers owning cheese shops hating each other’s guts for pointless reasons. Maybe it’s wrong for me to focus on those things instead of the moon, but that’s where my brain goes. That’s who I am right now.”

“All right,” said Bert Fields, of the BBC. “But isn’t landing on a moon made of chee—excuse me, a moon with a newly developed organic matrix, inherently dangerous?

“So, no. It’s not fair. But it’s the world that we’ve made for ourselves, isn’t it. Or at least, the world that we let those who we elected decide was the one we should have.”

We’re going to keep being in the path. Maybe not every time the moon farts out a mountain, but more than enough.

“And in the meantime I still have tests and reading to do. I can’t get too worked up about death by cheese when I have six pre-Socratic philosophers to catch up on first.”

“It might be a flip off,” he said. “A what?” “It’s a thing that’s taking off,” Felix said. “People are gathering to flip off the moon. It’s mostly a student thing. I read about it on Reddit earlier today.” “Why are they flipping off the moon?” “Because it’s making them question the nature of reality and confront their possible mortality, mostly.” “We used to take shrooms for that,”

“You were in the Astronomy Department,” Ted said. “You told me you were having an existential crisis about the moon turning to cheese.”

Everyone has a last time for everything,