Moonstar

by David Gerrold

  It was Orl who brought Jobe to Cameron, sailing with no great regard for Jobe’s connection with the clipper, so of course they missed it. When they arrived, Jobe found it was gone two days before—because Orl hadn’t wanted to waste the fuel for the motor, or strain herself to rig two extra sails. “Hmpf,” she said, when she heard the packet had been missed. “A wasted trip. Well, let’s go back.” She was an echo of Kirstegaarde, not surprising since she flourished in her shadow; she too was skeptical of Option.

  Jobe said, “There must be other boats.”

  Orl was dogmatic. “You’re too young to be alone.”

  “Then, you take me—it’s your fault we got here late.”

  “I’m not going to take any more time away from my nets. We’ll go home and decide what to do there.”

  Jobe hated hearing Orl refer to Kossarlin as home. It was Jobe’s home, yes—but Orl’s? Never. “Let’s radio,” she said.

  “Too expensive.” The family had a general policy against purchasing unsubscribed services—even for emergencies; long-distance mail and phone services were “luxuries” not subscribed. Besides, each member of the Kossarlin circle was supposed to be autonomous; that was supposed to be one of the Kossarlin’s strengths.

  “It’s your fault,” accused Jobe. “You didn’t use the motor or the extra sails.”

  Orl lifted her arm in a vaguely threatening gesture, but Jobe twisted out of her reach. “If you ever touch me,” she said, “Hojanna will kill you—if Kuvig and Suko don’t do it first.” It was the meanest thing she’d ever said, and she instantly regretted it. It was a wrongness to remind a person that she was new to a family that way. But she couldn’t bring herself to apologize—not to Orl. She grabbed her case and started walking up the pier. Orl followed, but at a distance.

  Jobe went to the local service office and obtained a warrant of protection, subscribed to the Kossarlin circle in the Lagin; it was so simple she felt disdainful of Orl for not realizing this obvious solution in the first place. Orl shrugged, it didn’t matter to her. She was relieved of her responsibility now, she could return to Kossarlin with a clear conscience. She left without a word of either advice or affection, just a grunted, “Don’t choose Reethe, you’d be a lousy bed”—which Jobe didn’t know whether to take as a joke or insult.

  Jobe caught the first barge to Tarralon that the service office could locate. It was a freight barge, slow and tranquil; it was owned by its sailors, they were a family all their own, with small children running free upon the upper decks, but none of them were more than a few years old—the gap between their age and Jobe’s was large enough that they could regard her as another grown-up, and were therefore free to ignore her. She was a transient, not a family-member. Jobe didn’t mind. She sat in the bow and practiced on her flute and kept out of the way. There didn’t seem to be that much work on such a barge, but the family always seemed to be busy either fishing or sewing or repairing or painting, that is, when they weren’t rigging or sighting or climbing aloft in the sails.

  They were a friendly group, though. At dinner, they would regale Jobe with stories about their past lives; each of the sailors seemed determined to out-story all the others and they spun wild fancies of myth and history all evening long. Jobe didn’t know what to believe or not—they told her of the places they had seen: the Forbidden Mountain, Stormhole, the Great Spill of the North, the Upland Desert, the valley of Lorisander that has no shield and yet is an oasis in the barrens, far west of Lagin. They’d been on islands that had no shields of their own, yet had two eclipses every day, one early and one late, because they were between two adjacent shielded areas. They’d been so far south, they’d seen the polar ice, huge bergs of it drifting silently, majestically, in cold oceans. They’d once sailed across the vast unshielded shallows of the north and braved the white waters of the distant east. They’d stood on airless mountaintops and walked the plains of Avatar and Alabaster, the twin settlements of Lannit’s lowlands. Once they’d even met an Erdik! It was tall and sharp-featured—ugly! They hadn’t liked her. And they spoke of the persons they had known in all these places, all their previous lovers, and the ones they’d longed to love as well—Quare Dorry and Sweet Hazel, Bright Pennelly and Lavar (the Fool) and Tumbleson as well. Then they told of how they’d married into this circle, as if it were their destiny—and by now Jobe suspected it was not; these people were too volatile to stay locked in one place for any length. And some of them even spoke of how they’d come to their own Choices, Dakkarik and Rethrik. Many of the tales were obviously long familiar to the members of the family, but they seemed to appreciate hearing them again—as if it were the delight of a new audience that so amused them, not the telling of the tale itself, and perhaps that’s what it was. Jobe was entranced by all the colors of their stories, the weavings of emotions and events. Her face expressed her empathy with each and every incident, she laughed and giggled when Lavar lost her kilt at Fest, she cried when Pennelly went back to the sea, she felt glad when little Lor was born, and it showed within her eyes as brightly as if a colored light were painting all the hues of wonder’s spectrum on her face. Jobe was entranced by their tales, filled by their hearty red soups and heavy dark bread, and warmed by their gentle affection for each other—all of which they shared with her without any reservation at all. She was half tempted to skip Option altogether and ask if she could marry in here, even though there wasn’t anyone in this circle who she was immediately attracted to as a possible lover.

  At Tarralon, she found that she had missed the shuttle across to Option—as she had expected she would—and the Tarralon service office had to put her on a supply barge that would stop at Fallen Wall on it way east. From there she would catch a local transport that traveled on a regular route to all of the communities along the inner wall of the Option Crescent. To her regret, she did not see much of Tarralon, only its docks—but the skyline of the city filled her with awe and wonder; she had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. As her barge sailed east, she stood aft, staring west, watching the fabled pink city glisten in its darkday magic. Its rose and pastel spires and domes were all clustered on the rolling hills, climbing toward a glittering crystal garden at the top; the whole city twinkled and glowed with coruscating lights. It looked a vaster carnival than any festive Jobe had ever seen.

  Fallen Wall, by contrast, was a meager fishing community of dingy wooden buildings, all cluttered haphazard on the tip of Option’s crescent. North, the opposite tip could be seen, a darker line along the darkness of horizon—the opening of this crater ring was only a few kilometers wide, although the crater itself was nearly a hundred and fifty kilometers at its widest. It was not so much a crescent as a broken ring, but any broken ring was automatically a crescent. Within the atoll was a good-sized sheltered sea. Jobe transferred at Fallen Wall to a creeping mail boat that slid across the silent waters like a beetle on a rainstorm puddle. The looming mountains of the crater wall drifted past like high gray curtains, steep and dark. Above, the stars glared all cold and unblinking. After a while, the boat turned inward, although it really felt outward, away from the walls and straight across the crater sea. Jobe could see lights scattered here and there along the distant mountain walls, tiny communities or farms. Despite this island’s proximity to cosmopolitan Tarralon, much of it was still a wild frontier. There were probably dangerous animals living on those spiky mountains. No roads, no docks, no radios. All those little lights looked so lonely and so bleak. Almost pitiful. So distant . . . The darkday night was chill with a thin and whistling wind. It touched her thighs and arms beneath her cloak and made her shiver, more from fear than cold.

  They circled Peakskill as the final moondrop faded; in the dark it was just a darker darkness, a pointy mountain in the center of the sea, all tall and jagged, uninhabited, although there was a ruined and tumbled dock, a remnant of a long-forgotten effort. A sailor pointed it out to Jobe, hitting it with a spotlight as they passed. Jobe could barely see it in the
distance. The pilot liked to pass this close, the sailor said, because it “teased the ghosts.” And, sometimes, local passengers waited on the part of the dock that still stood.

  The boat slowed to tenth-speed then; the pilot was timing her course so that she would make her first port of call just a little after dawn, then she would circle around the inner edge, taking two full sundays to complete the circuit. She would make her calls only at convenient hours of daylight; this was a familiar routine for her.

  Jobe caught a nap on a bale of canvas matting, and when she awoke, dawn was lining Option on the horizon, red and white and purple, and all the greens like black. The dock lay in a sheltered bay beneath jutting cliffs that marked its rugged boundaries. A set of buoys, a simple wooden pier were all there was to mark a habitation. Whatever domes or buildings that were there must be on the other side of that jagged hill; a path was visible cutting through the foliage. The mail boat didn’t even dock, the pilot didn’t like the channel. Jobe was put ashore by dinghy, and left there on the pier with her one small suitcase and her many knotted insecurities.

  The air at Option-camp seemed all molten, yellow-white. It seared like a dragon’s breath. It dried the skin, the eyes, the hair, the lungs—especially the lungs; it was almost too hot to breathe. It rasped so hot it seemed to vibrate in the unglazed light of Godheart. The substance of the day seemed to ripple and dance, and when Jobe looked across the hills or down the shore, the stretching vistas wavered and tossed like landscapes shining in the realm of faerie. The hills were shrouded with vegetation so lush it formed a sea of green, dark purpling shades of color, wave upon wave of chlorophyll calicoes, rank upon rank of forest and fern, trees and shrubs piled one on top of the other in an exuberant burst of life’s continuing process, growth and decay so intertwined that it was impossible to tell where one life-form left off and the ones that fed upon it began. Creepers and vines were hanging draped like velvet curtains; a thousand shades of moss and climbers grew upon them like embroidery. The forest was a tumult of growth, riotous in Satlin’s blazing day, reaching and climbing up the tumbled hillsides toward the sheerer walls of the crescent’s ridge. Those steeper spires caught the wind-driven clouds and held them till they wept, dissolving into rain. There were showers on the slopes, washing the dry air like waterfalls and turning it into a muggy steam bath, turning the day into something damp and sodden and limp, coming to rest only in the forest’s wet and silent roots.

  Jobe sighed at no one in particular, shouldered her case and started down the path. It curled through the fern-floored forest, turned toward the beach, then back inland, upward and around a hill, into a valley that looked as if it had been carved by glaciers, even though that was patently impossible considering the planet’s geological history.

  Once beneath the tall green alders, the sparkling aspen, and the gnarled broadleaf trees, Jobe was immediately cooler. Her bare feet went squish into dark soft mud—the ground was still wet from this morning’s storm. The water still trickled and dripped and ran into the carpet of turquoise and purple thirst. The rain forest higher up held the water in its leaves and in its roots, in shallow pools and networks of rivulets and streams, some permanent, others as transient as the clouds that birthed them. The forest murmured with the sound of water seeking its way back toward the sea, it giggled as the water moved, it whispered with the damp.

  As Jobe entered the moody shadows, the air became moist enough to smell. Normally the days of Satlin were too dry to carry scents—mongers had to spray the air with mist if their wares were aromatic and they wanted them to sell—but here in the forest, in the shaded-blue and yellow-sunlight-stippled caverns of the arching leaves and branches, surrounded by the darkened walls of ferns and blossoms, the air was sweet and cloying. The forest breathed perfume so rich as to be almost overpowering; the shadows reeked with it, and so did everything that passed beneath. Tiny droplets hung suspended in the air; a mist of water and fragrance. There were falls and splashing streams, there were finely showered sprays, shiny vines and honeysuckle braided all about. Water sang of life here; whatever Jobe touched was moist with it, her arms and legs were beaded with the tiny cooling drops, her clothes were damp.

  And there were flowers—in such a place, how could there by anything but flowers? Huge, brilliant displays, some as large as a meter in diameter! The island was a carnival, riotous with color—the blooms dripped from every branch in garish, unembarrassed joy. The forest was draped with them, as if decorated by an impulsive, giddy matron. There were pink flares, veined with white and purple; gray puffers, the largest Jobe had ever seen; Pilgrim hoods, tall and somber, burning red within; and night candles—these latter were slender, stiff and white, with fiery orange buds hovering like feather flames above them. They grew in statuesque clusters at her feet, and on branches at her waist and before her eyes and above her head. They rose in tiers and ranks toward the distant forest ceiling. They seemed to glow with inner light and turned the caverns of the forest into a cathedral of worship for the Mother Reethe.

  Option had been a wilderness crescent for many generations, set aside by ancient Authority to develop in its own wild directions. It had been seeded with a spectrum of flora and fauna that ranged from bizarre to beautiful, from curious to capricious, then left alone to develop its own identity without the influence of humanity’s divergent purpose. Authority needed to know if the Satlik bio-circle could balance itself naturally, or if it needed continual maintenance; there were hundreds of is lands set aside like this, each a different answer to the question of what shape a true Satlik wilderness would take. These crescents were controls to the rest of the planet’s disciplined direction, providing alternatives as well as warming, and always serving to remind the Satlik of the artifice and fragility of their lives. Despite its now being opened for limited settlement, Option was still very much a wilderness land; no changes were allowed on it that would endanger its wilderness character. The few farms that Jobe had seen from the shuttle, the fishing village at Fallen Wall, were themselves part of the experimental nature of the island—to see what effects their presence might make upon a wilderness, or vice versa. Jobe’s destination, the camp that took its name from the crescent, had once been the main study station here; now it was a school—of sorts. The island was no longer deemed important enough to warrant a full-time station, and, in fact, the closest settlement was more than forty kilometers away and on the outside of the crescent. This place, Option, was a lonely one, desolate in its lushness, sterile in its fertility. Whatever plants and animals grew and lived here, they had been forgotten—and deliberately so—by the ranks of humanity. Whatever lived here was alone to work out its destiny for itself. There were no influences, no guidance, no disciplines to be enforced by the large environment without. That applied as well to any person who also chose to live here. She too would be ignored and left to grow in her own way. And that was why the camp was here on Option, for that was the goal of its founders, to provide exactly such a place for those who came to make their Choice. They would shape their futures for themselves—and they would be better futures for being freely chosen. Left to their devices, they could grow tall and lithe, or broad and gnarly, or sensitive to darker magics—whatever was their will, whatever their inherent destiny, they could make it for themselves here without others turning it toward other ends.

  This island had a wild spirit, free and independent; it was reflected in the forests and those who lived within. As uncultivated was the land, so were the younglings who came to it. They lived without a higher guidance—only faith in Mother Reethe. She was on their side, and so they felt no need of wisdom aged in human lives, no need of that experience or strength. They had hope here. And that, they hoped, would be enough.

  Lono was expected to become Rethrik by her family, and indeed all preparations of the spirit had been made for it. There was no verbal signal, merely inner expectations based, in part, in the quiet strength of Lono’s character. Instead, as a result of her long hours
entwined with Rurik and the growing love that comes with knowledge of the other, she began to tend toward Dakka. More and more, she was Dakkarik to Rurik’s Reethe; Rurik seemed to like it best that way. Perhaps Lono would have been a Rethrik had her lover wished—to her it was not the form of love that mattered, merely that she loved; she was lucky to be one of those who can be comfortable within herself no matter who she is—but because Rurik was happiest fed on Rurik’s joy, because it gave her ecstasies uncounted to please her so, she became her lover’s Dakka—her son, her lover, her husband, father: her male half; she was all of these because it pleased her lover, and because it pleased herself. As she would have been intrigued with her Rethrik self had it grown to be so fully expressed, now she was intrigued with being Dakka. She admired the way her body responded visibly to the thought of Rurik’s touch, her sweet embrace—as if by that single rising gesture she was transformed from logic’s thoughtfulness, a soul elite and seemingly detached, into something more in tune with nature’s rhythms, passion’s joyful animal delight, a basic level of sensation craved and magnified through sharing with another passion-creature like herself. Let their spirits join in moments of emotion, their eyes mirrored in loving worship until tears of overwhelmed delight begin to flow, still the glue that bound them to each other was the knowledge of the ecstasies they shared when they stopped being formal beings and became two creatures wrapped enraptured in their mating. That two souls could so relish such a base and sensual joy was a secret pleasure all their own.