Short Sorcery: Leigh Brackett’s “The Moon That Vanished” by Bill Ward From the start, from the very title itself, the reader is presented with a mystery in Leigh Brackett’s “The Moon That Vanished.” For one thing the story’s setting of Venus – think the Venus of Edgar Rice Burroughs rather than that of NASA probes – has no moon. But there is much more going on than that. The protagonist, David Heath, is himself disoriented; slumped stupefied in the Venusian equivalent of an opium den and vaguely wondering why some dangerous barbarian is asking about him. Not that he cares, for “[t]he dead and the mad do not care.” Heath is taboo – persona non grata for the human population of Venus, a complete outcast. Again, we do not know why. We do know that the menacing barbarian who drags him out of the den of vice that is the Palace of All Possible Delights implies that Heath, the captain of a sailing ship, has found something called the Moonfire. This is what has made him a pariah, and it seems that this is what also cost him his great love, Ethne. But are the visions that torment Heath merely the shadows of trauma, or something else? When he briefly seems to transform into more than his ruined, broken self – when he becomes godlike for a split second – is it something in the alien narcotics, or a power within Heath himself? “Darkness on Venus is not like the darkness of Earth or Mars. The planet is hungry for light and will not let it go. The face of Venus never sees the sun but even at night the hope and the memory of it are there, trapped in the eternal clouds.” The three central characters of “The Moon That Vanished” are themselves each hungry for a kind of light, for the legendary Moonfire, an ancient, sacred power that legend states can transform mortal into god. Broca, the brazen upland warrior that locates and presses Heath into his service, wants power in excess of any tribal chief. Alor, his lover and runaway temple slave of the Guardians of the Mysteries of the Moon, wants safety and end to the pursuit by her former masters. Heath, once back aboard his ship and instilled with a new sense of purpose,...