ALL THE COLORS OF THE MOON

ALL THE COLORS OF THE MOON ___WHAT COLOR IS THE MOON TONIGHT?

Ulrich was a teenage android who had been made for a mission to Mars ten years earlier. He, like the other few teenage androids, had been programmed to teach the most disparate languages  to children born to women of the human species , but who were born on Mars, who were not exactly the same as the children who were born on the earth.

How it had happened that Ulrich had come back, or had been sent back on the earth, it was an enough complicated story, but indeed even more than complicated, it was a story that was unlikely. Yes, because it had happened that, at a certain moment if his stay on Mars Ulrich had had a crisis, that it would be more appropriate to call mystical than existential.

The fact is that one day Ulrich, during a comparative lesson of Finnish Ugrian  and Bohemian dialects , had started all inspired, heated, to talk about Christ and the Madonna, the apostles and the evangelists. He even had launched himself, with enthusiasm, to speak of miracles! And not only of the miracles of Jesus, but also of the miracles of the saints. Starting from the miracles of Saint Anthony , he had also come to speak about the miracles of Padre Pio of Pietralcina.

With the result that the children, who were expecting the Finnish Ugrian and the Bohemian dialects lesson, they, poor children, were frightened, they started to cry and to yell desperately,

asking for help.

It was decided, by the First Council, a team of great scientists assigned to evaluate the behavior of artificial creatures like him, that Ulrich should be sent back to Earth as soon as possible. None of those scientists really knowledgeable about android behavior____as well as about human behavior___could explain how , why, what had happened, it could have been possible.

An android who started talking about Christ and his mother, the Madonna, to children born of humans, but nevertheless born on Mars…..it was incredible.

Ulrich relocated ( sent back) on the earth, he was practically unemployed He saw his tutor once a week. He was a man called Aldous , assigned to check up his functioning. And no more than twice a month Ulrich met with others of his kind, who, like him, had been sent back to Earth, either from Mars, or from other planets, or from space stations, since they too, like Ulrich, had proved inadequate for the task for which they had been created. All they too, since they had been sent back to Earth, were no longer used. Their tutor, every time he met them, promised them that soon they would be used again in some important operation or enterprise.

In the meantime they were on standby, oh, but since they worked perfectly, they shouldn’t be lingering in that kind of limb much longer.

It seemed that the lack of employment, or work, made the others of his kind, who were all adult android, fear that they would soon be terminated, that is, killed. In Ulrich, instead, the forced inactivity had unleashed , had heightened the desire not so much to become a human being____the fate of humans did not seem so enviable to him___as that of being considered, that is, of being believed a boy like them by the boys of his age.

Next to his house there was a meadow where boys of his age played football every afternoon .

Ulrich wished he could play an entire match with them. But when he managed to be part of one of the two teams, as soon as he touched the ball on the playing field, a fight broke out between the components of the two teams. The players of the opposite team of the one in which Ulrich had been allowed to play, had protested, and even more they had protested after the first goal scored by Ulrich. They said, indeed screamed, that it was not correct to play with someone like him, A ROBOT! Ulrich had replied that he wasn’t a robot at all, that he was a boy like them.

Then they, the human boys, had begun to say, to scream too, but how, if you could also see from the way he touched the ball with his foot that he was not made of flesh and blood like them!

Ulrich had felt so desperate , as desperate as an android can feel, that he wanted to cry, but he couldn’t cry, since he was not a human being.

As he would have liked to be considered a boy like them by the boys of his age, so Ulrich would have liked to be considered a boy like everyone else by girls.

One summer night at the fair in the neighborhood where he lived he sat at a table where a girl was sitting alone, eating an ice cream. Many people had started to dance in the square, while a small orchestra was playing. Ulrich had asked the girl if she wanted to dance. The girl had said that he preferred to remain sit , looking at the others dancing. “ There is a magnificent moon tonight, isn’t? Never seen a moon so big, so bright “ the girl had said, smiling dreamily at him.

“It’s true “ Ulrich murmured, looking for something to say about the moon, which he was able to see as a little luminescent point in the sky. “ Ah, wonderful this pink moon” he said.

“ Oh, the pink moon! But, of course , the moon can also be pink” the girl agreed. “ Indeed it can also be blue, but also green, and even red!”

“ The moon…it’s a different color tonight that I can look at it together with you” Ulrich said in a sigh. The girl was looking at him in a radiant smile , and in that moment he felt as a real, human boy of his age.

“Let’s dance” the girl invited him. While Ulrich was dancing with her, his face very close to hers, his eyes in her eyes, it seemed to him that confetti of colored light fell from the sky above him.

He thought that perhaps it was the moon that rained on him in a thousand colored flakes. And to think that the moon still appeared to him only as a very little point far away in the sky. But he was sure that, even if he was not able to see the moon , he was feeling him, the moon was raining on him, and on the girl with whom he was dancing.