There are foolish conjectures, inspired wholly by my distance from you and by the difficulty of communication. If metals remained on the moon, how different the case would be! Sitting where I am, I could speak to you, as legend says our fore-fathers spoke, ignoring distance; or, better, I could board a carrier and be transported there in an hour's time.
I have warned the Womanland Government incessantly against the termite peril, which threatens to cut short even the few centuries of decadence that would normally remain to humans on the moon. Already these insects have appropriated over seven-eighths of the lunar surface; for Womanland has suffered hardly less than we from their invasions.
The ladies of the Court laugh at my forebodings no less than at my youth. They find my sparse beard and short, upturned nose, provocative of endless hilarity. Only the queen is sympathetic; and I think that she, too, considers me unduly pessimistic, though in her brief lifetime—she is but twenty-one years old—the non-infested area of her realm has been reduced by two-thirds. My pleadings for co-operation against the menace have fallen on barren ground, the general sentiment being that I would use the termites as bogies by which to frighten women into renewed subjection to their pre-Separation lords.
It is difficult to work under such handicaps; but progress will be as rapid as I can make it, for I am daily more deeply convinced that Colla and Womanland must join forces unequivocally and instantly if the termites are to be pushed back.
Birna, etc., etc.
Seventh Rotation, 12,077
My Lords:
It relieves me to continue this message, though I cannot send it until your courier arrives. I have expected him now for half a year.
Yesterday the queen accompanied me on a taran-back canter across-country, thirty court ladies escorting us. Despite my companion's extraordinary attractiveness—she stands straight as an arrow on the back of the swift-racing web-footed fowl, her grey eyes eager and her fresh skin glowing—my mind held few pleasant reflections as we neared the border; for in the five Rotations since my arrival, the termites have forced evacuation of the one provincial Womanland city that was still inhabited. Now only Alania, the capital, with its surrounding pasture lands, remains.
When I consider that only a thousand years ago the moon provided life and comfort to 800,000,000 persons, it seems—nay, it is—incredible that today we total, males and females, less than 10,000, who decrease in number even as I write. We, who filled every arable acre of the globe with our farms and our beasts, today skulk in two craters, jealously hoarding the tiny supplies of air that linger in crevices and hollows. Through what cause the moon's gravitation could have lessened fifty percent in thirty generations none knows; but the lessening, and the consequent loss of atmospheric molecules into space, presage an early end to our race. To-day, notwithstanding Luna's lowered gravitational attraction, her atmosphere will not support even the wooden airships that our ancestors dreamed of building; water is to be found only in the deepest craters; and a man travelling taran-back, as I did
