This story takes place in Amercia, an imaginational world where, among many other differences, the moon is, evidently, an at least spiritually inhabitable place.

Steven Gray is a young man who has left home and a troubled family life to travel to a large settlement called St. Alice. It is built around a large institution called a scholastary (actually, it's the scholastary that's called St. Alice and the settlement is named after it), which is a commune/school devoted to the collection of books and the reading and discussing thereof.

Children in the settlement are taught by tutors from the scholastary. Having spent his life so far doing nothing but reading, Steven hopes to get one of these tutoring jobs. When he goes to the scholastary, he is referred to a reader (as the people who live in the scholastary are called) named Matthew Barnes, a moonstoryologist, who is acquainted with many of the settlement families.

Reader Barnes is a middle-aged man who now spends his days talking about the books he reads with small groups of people, under the trees and around the coffee tables of St. Alice. Steven makes his acquaintance, becomes a tutor to the children of two families (this is another story), and makes friends with Barnes.

One evening Steven goes up to the scholastary to talk with Reader Barnes. He goes to his rooms in the living quarters section of the scholastary. Barnes' rooms consist of a small living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. The bedroom is sparely furnished: a bed and a wardrobe and one picture on the wall. The livingroom is cluttered - the walls are covered with pictures and posters, the bookshelves crammed with books. There are several chairs, including a large upholstered one with a lamp next to it on a small table. There is a large low table in the middle of the room.

Barnes makes coffee and they begin a game of shatranj. This is an ancient form of chess in which there are four sets of eight pieces, one for each side of the board, and each player plays two sets alternately. The object is for each king to mate the opposing queen. This has nothing to do with the following story, but it's what they were doing while Matthew was telling it.

While they're playing, Steven asks Barnes how he came to be interested in moonstoryology. Barnes tells him that 20 years ago, during his second year of lecturing, he had been reading the skystories collected in the bookhouse and discussing them with his listeners. Many of the stories had to do with personifications of the weather, describing the behavior of the clouds, wind, rain and snow in terms of the interactions of people. Others had to do with the stars, planets, the sun and the moon.

He noticed that, in several of the moonstories, the moon was called the planet of blue roses. He became curious to discover the origin of this strange name and read all the moonstories he could find, but none ever explained why the moon should be described in this way. He would often ask his listeners about it, but for years no one knew anything about it.

One day one of his listeners was a young woman named Emily. After the discussion, she asked to talk to him privately. She said she knew of this name for the moon but it was a somewhat personal matter and she preferred not to discuss it with anyone but him.

During the next few weeks, they went for several long walks together. She told him that she belonged to a spiritual society whose members called themselves Selenes. Their common experience was that, when looking at the moon, they felt it to be emanating an attracting radiance, a silent, summoning song. This experience was referred to as "the call of the moon". And every Selene, after years of aesthetic meditation practices, was finally taken to the moon in a mystical transmigration. In the context of this event, the moon was always called the planet of blue roses.

She told him some of the Selenes' practices. There was Walking From One Beautiful Thing To The Next, in which, while walking anywhere, you would find something beautiful in the near distance and, arriving at it, find another beautiful thing further on, and walk to it, and so on. There was the Mandala Of The Horizon, in which you perceived the horizon as the perimeter of a mandala of which you were always at the center, always already There, where you were supposed to be. [There's another one, but it hasn't "surfaced" yet. -Auth.]

He fell in love, with her romantically spiritual nature, and her dark-haired Barbara Hersheyesque earthy prettiness. But they could not become lovers. She was committed to her spiritual goal and wanted no one to leave behind. He himself never felt the call of the moon, though he thought he got as close to it as he ever would, gazing at her moonlit face as they stood together at the top of St. Alice's southwestern tower in the middle of the night.

A year and a month after they had met, she asked him to meet her at the top of a little hill outside the settlement. They had met there once before, the one and only time he had kissed her. Her eyes told him then that that one kiss would have to embody everything they meant to each other. And all the years afterward, over and over again, in his memory he took that kiss out like a keepsake from a box and remembered each moment of it, until it did become like their story, with a beginning, and an end, and timelessness between.

The moon was full as he climbed the hill, and he saw her standing, silhouetted in the moonlight. But when he got to the top, she was gone.

So he had spent the years studying moonstories with an impossible hope always at the back of his mind. The oldest stories he could find were written by people who had lived in Amercia centuries ago, and there were places named that had been inhabited by others who had felt the call of the moon. In the desert to the north there was a mountain called The Silver Queen.

As they put away the game pieces, Barnes tells Steven that he believes he has found a way to find Emily.