The Moon and the Face

by Patricia A. Mckillip

A roil of smoke full of pungent herbs almost made him cough. Then the air cleared, and he could make out the firelit figures. A woman—Korre’s mother—sat beside the firepit, crushing dried herbs into it between her fingers. The Healer lay beneath furs. His eyes were closed. The fire swam across his face, and Terje could see the sweat, the deep furrows of pain. Icrane made a sudden, restive movement as Terje gazed at him, turning his head, murmuring, and the woman put her hand quickly to his brow.

  Terje sank down under the window. His mouth was dry; he tried to swallow but couldn’t. His eyes stung from the smoke. “I can’t even talk to him,” he heard himself whisper. “I can’t even tell him—” And then Regny was there, his steady hold coaxing Terje up from the ground, his face hard, stunned in the light.

  “Go,” he breathed. They moved far downriver, past the houses, deep into the forest before they spoke again.

  They stopped on a sandy, boulder-strewn bank. The great broken stones would hide their fire; the water, running swiftly there, would hide their voices. Terje gathered twigs, struck firestones over them aimlessly, but they refused to spark, and Regny, with a muttered exclamation, took them out of his hands.

  “Flint.” The sudden exasperation in his voice made Terje stare at him. Regny struck a fire and added harshly to the flame, “One call to the Outstation, Domecity could send medication—”

  “No.”

  Regny looked at him. The anger left his face. He added twigs to the fire and said softly, “The River is the World.”

  “Yes.” The word caught in his throat, hurt. He said unsteadily, “I wonder—I wonder what’s the matter with him.”

  “Snake bite. Food poisoning. Some virus.”

  “Was it us? Kyreol and me? Leaving him?” He stirred away from the thought. “I heard some hunters talking. He doesn’t have—He never chose anyone to teach his healings to. Maybe he thought Kyreol would come back.”

  “After four years, he would hardly be dying of sorrow.”

  “He—he should have known.”

  “He should have known what?”

  “That he would need to choose the next Healer.”

  “He’s not that old. He probably didn’t expect this.”

  Terje picked up a twig, burrowed holes in the sand with it, searching for words. “This is one of the things he should have dreamed,” he said finally. Regny was silent; Terje added, burrowing deep, “He is probably expecting Kyreol. And she’s on Xtal.”

  Regny sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. You know this world better than I do. But I really don’t think, with all his powers of dreaming and foresight, he would spend his dying hours expecting someone who isn’t going to come.”

  Terje’s hand stilled. He tossed the twig on the fire, swept his hair back with his hands, his face bewildered. “She’ll be angry with herself,” he said softly.

  “She couldn’t have come here even if she had known.”

  “She’ll be angry that she ever left. That her father is dying and she’s on another planet.”

  “These things happen,” Regny said gently.

  “Not very often,” Terje said, sighing, “in the Riverworld.”

  He was silent then, gazing into the fire, his body assuming a hunter’s pose, unremarkable as a stone. Memories of the Healer ran through his mind: childhood memories of Icrane standing beneath torch-fire on the betrothal carpet, of Icrane gazing at the Moon-Flash, of him in a boat at midnight, holding fire and water, chanting the names of the dead to the River. And earlier memories, of Icrane and Nara, before she had left him to find the River’s end. Of Icrane and Nara and a very small Kyreol, gathering herbs and bark for dream tea in the forest. Of Icrane opening the door to Terje’s knock, his face at once fierce and gentle, a peaceful man, a dreamer of mysteries, whose voice was the River’s voice, whose mind was the World.

  The fire formed under his eyes again. Regny was gone; he had slipped away quietly, probably to hunt, for dawn was breaking and the small animals would be stirring. But he didn’t come back for hours. Terje caught a fish, then prowled the forest for berries. His prowling led him upriver. He watched the Healer’s house from under brush-cover. The Riverworld seemed to be going about its accustomed habits. People brought small gifts to the Healer’s doorstep: food, flowers, a caged bird. But there was no gathering of boats by day. The scented smoke still drifted out of the roof, hung in the still trees.

  He found Regny again in the late afternoon, dozing in the sunlight on the sand. He lifted his head as Terje sat down beside him.

  “Where did you go?” Terje asked.

  “Outstation.”

  “Why?”

  Regny swept sand out of his hair, yawning. “Nara.”

  “What?”

  He sat up, blinking. “Nara,” he said again, his eyes on the whorling, dimpling water. “She seemed uneasy when we left. Maybe this was why. I thought she should know that the Healer is so ill.” He paused, added, “She said you could return to Domecity when you wanted to. I’ll stay.”

  “I’m all right,” Terje said.

  “I told her that.” He pitched a stone into the water. “She sounded—not surprised. But very sad.”

  “They’ve been leaving gifts at his door all day.”

  “It’s hard for her.” He threw another stone, with more force. “She makes the rules. She could save his life, probably. But—”

  “I understand,” Terje said, looking away from him.

  “I don’t,” Regny breathed. “Sometimes I really don’t.” He skipped a piece of flint halfway across the River. “She loved him, she married him, she’s not permitted to do anything, even see him. She said she’s glad you’re here.”

  “Why?” Terje said.

  “Because you’re part of both her worlds. You know the Healer. You’re part of her early memories. Of when she was young and lived happily with Icrane and had no idea anything at all existed beyond the Riverworld. You can share her sorrow. She also said don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Oh.”

  “She said impulsive. I say stupid.”

  “I won’t,” Terje said mechanically. Regny looked at him. His face eased suddenly.

  “You understand this world so well. This tiny, peculiar Riverworld.”

  Terje nodded absently. “It’s easy to understand. You sit quietly, listening to the River, and after a while everything in the Riverworld—even death—becomes just part of everything else. Everything changes, nothing changes. You see it—through the dream. To someone from Domecity, it’s just a tiny stretch of water some primitive people happen to be living along. But to someone in the dream, every leaf and every child is exactly right. Exactly as it must be. They’d have to dream an enormous dream to understand Domecity.” He drew his eyes away from the water, added softly, “So. I won’t do anything stupid. It’s not only Domecity that makes the rules. The Riverworld does, too. I don’t think it would like them broken.”

  They stood watch again that night along with the other hunters. Torch-fire crusted the water; the chanting began again. Birds called through the trees, wakened from their sleep. Terje found himself dozing on his feet and realized that he hadn’t slept for two days. He let Regny watch for him and lay down under a tree. He thought longingly of Kyreol, remembering, during their long journey downriver, how she was always there when he woke. They had told each other their dreams… He fell asleep, remembering. When he woke hearing his name, he thought she was calling him. He lifted his head, murmuring, confused, smelling the damp earth.

  “Terje!”

  His breath froze. Regny was shaking him, but it wasn’t Regny’s voice.

  A woman’s voice. The Healer’s door was open; light spilled down the bank and into the water.

  “Terje!” she called again, her voice soft, deep, unsurprised. He got to his feet, staring in horror at Regny, trying to see his dark face in the dark.

  “No one saw me,” he whispered. “I swear it, Regny, no one saw me—”

  “Terje!”

 
; “What should I do?”

  “Terje! The Healer wants you! Come!”

  “Regny—”

  Regny’s warning grip finally eased on his arm. “Well,” he said, his breathing quick, “when you’re in a simple world, do the simplest thing possible.”

  “Terje!”

  “Answer her.”

  4

  KYREOL OPENED her eyes. For a moment she only saw darkness and the memory of a fading dream…What was it? Night, water, torch-fire, something to do with Terje, something sad. Her throat burned with a deep, inexplicable sorrow. “Terje,” she whispered and, turning her head, felt the tears brush off fabric in front of her face. She was enveloped, as if between two soft, giant hands; she was surrounded. She struggled and light fell over her face.

  She gave a startled, helpless sob, remembering. They had fallen out of the sky; a world of pure white hurtled itself at them, growing larger and larger. She pummeled the softness around her; it gave, and she crawled out onto ripped metal, cracked and melted shielding. Two of the air-beds had tom free, sandwiched themselves around her. The ship didn’t explode, she thought surprisedly. Maybe we’re all right. But she heard no voices. Only wind, and the tiny tick of sand blowing into the hull.

  Still on her hands and knees, she felt her eyes swell again with tears. A hand lay across her vision, motionless, waxen. She reached out, swallowing, and felt for a pulse. She made her head turn finally to look at the face. It was the navigator.

  The pilot still sat strapped to her chair, her face against the control panel. She had salvaged what she could of the landing; the ship was battered and ruined, but upright. She had dragged it across the unknown landscape, slowed it enough to save Kyreol’s life.

  “Joss Tappan,” Kyreol whispered. The silence within and without was dead. She drew breath and screamed, “Joss!”

  Hours later, she huddled in a blanket outside the ship, watching the sky. It was night; the moon had turned its back to the sun. The fretful wind had finally died. Moons, half-moons, quarter-moons were suspended in a breathtaking serenity above her, striped light and dark by the sun’s fire, the planet’s shadow. Of the eighteen moons, she had no idea which one she was on.

  “I should remember,” she said reasonably to the protrusion of rock she sat on. “It’s the one I can breathe on.” After the hour she had spent weeping, searching the ship for Joss, trying the dead controls, it had finally occurred to her that whatever else was amiss, the atmosphere was breatheable.

  Still she hadn’t found Joss. One of three things might have happened:

  He had fallen out as they bumped and crashed across the moon’s surface.

  He had been dazed and wandered off, leaving the wind to cover his footprints in the soft, white sand.

  One of his alien friends had spirited him away to an underground cavern, where even now he was instructing them to find Kyreol.

  “Someone on the planet must have seen the crash,” she murmured hopefully, gazing at the violet edge of planet among the moons. “A tiny moon-flash of exhaust…”

  But what kind of people lived in Niade’s water? Could they even make ships? Did they even see the stars? The planet was a mist of blue, marbled with a white and lavender cloud-cover. It was, she remembered, beautiful and dangerous…

  She pulled another thermal blanket around her, wondering how long night was. She wouldn’t freeze; she wouldn’t go hungry. She had salvaged food, water out of a broken line, blankets. She had put on a spacesuit to shield herself from the dust, though it was bulky and uncomfortable with all its tubes, communicators, protective systems. The blankets felt more comforting. She wanted a fire, but in the barren, white landscape, there was nothing to bum.

  There were no colors.

  “No colors,” she said softly. If she couldn’t find anyone else to talk to, then she’d talk to the rock. “Black and white. And the black is only shadow…”

  Later, she ate something out of a tube, drank a bit of the water she had carefully drained from the tank. Then she lay down, bundled in all the blankets she had found, yet still cold. And as lonely as if she were the last person in the universe.

  “Terje,” she whispered, curling up into a ball. But he was on the other side of night and space. So far away all she could do was send him a dream. Terje…

  ★

  SUNLIGHT ROLLED the darkness back across the moon’s face, and Kyreol saw the city.

  It was white. It lay just on the curve of the horizon, a vast, single slab of stone rising out of the moon’s bedrock, carved into clusters of ovals, blocks, bubbles, thin, towering cylinders. In the bright light, parts of it glowed like white fire.

  Kyreol stood up slowly, shedding blankets. The city was a dream, a lovely illusion sparked by the white dust and the sun’s rays. Or maybe any moment a bubble would open; a spacecraft elegant and white as eggshell would appear… Perhaps Joss had seen it, had gone there. But was it real? She watched, shading her eyes against the sun. The vision didn’t melt away. It was real. But no ship appeared.

  Nothing seemed to move around it at all.

  Well, she decided after a while. Maybe it’s a factory, not a space-city.

  But even then there would be ships. Freighters, shuttles… The sky was motionless, empty above the city.

  “Well, maybe it’s just a city.” Her voice sounded high, frightened to her ears. She had never encountered an alien from Niade before, never even seen a photograph of one. She had only met three aliens in her entire life, and these on the Observers’ Deck in the Dome with Joss Tappan beside her. They had been trade officials, who spoke the language of the Dome.

  “It’s a city full of people who don’t go anywhere. In which case,” she asked herself, “how did they get here on this moon?”

  They had always been here. A pale, dry, dusty people, like their surroundings, whose eyes were made to see only one color.

  She had to watch it a long time, the silent, sparkling city, while she argued with herself, before she finally found the courage to go to it.

  I should stay here, guard the ship.

  From what? she asked herself.

  Someone from the Dome might come looking for us. I’m safe here; I have food, water.

  How would the Dome know where you crashed? There may not have been time to send a message.

  Maybe there was time.

  It will take them nearly three days to get here. If they know where you are. The people in that city might be able to communicate with the Dome. Maybe the Dome knows where you are, but what if it doesn’t? You could wait here for three days for a ship that isn’t coming. Meanwhile, Nara will worry—

  “She felt something like this would happen.” Kyreol interrupted herself, surprised. “For that matter, so did I.”

  Anyway, she added to herself, what about Joss Tappan? What if he comes here?

  Joss Tappan isn’t afraid of alien cultures. He’d go to the city. He may already be there.

  Kyreol’s eyes went to the torn, broken hull of the ship. The powdery sand was already packing against it. A piece of torn fabric fluttered within, then was still. “What,” she whispered, “about the dead?”

  Her argumentative voice, suddenly silent, offered no advice. Water, earth, deep space—these things accepted the dead. But here, there was only the dry dust of an alien world. Kyreol scooped up a handful of it, frowning, and let it sift through her fingers.

  “They need to go home,” she decided finally. “Meanwhile—”

  Her eyes burning, her jaw set hard against her loneliness and fear, she covered them as best she could, shielding them from the sand and the unfamiliar night. Then she shed the spacesuit and filled a backpack with food and water, extra clothes, a com-crystal, a laser, and odd things that looked useful: a piece of thick wire, a table knife, a bar of soap, a tiny tape recorder, a book she had been reading, her comb, a feather amulet Nara had given her for luck, a nose-filter and a pair of goggles, and a light, voluminous raincoat that could double as a tent if the dus
t storms became impossible. The pack, fat as a sausage, dragged at her shoulder. This is stupid, she thought. I can walk to the city in a couple of hours. But still she took the pack.

  The city was much bigger and farther than she had guessed. It grew very slowly as she toiled toward it. She stopped to eat finally, studied it while she chewed. A few hours later, she had to stop again, as the white city melted into a hazy, purple twilight. She woke groggily in the morning, sore and dusty. Still nothing moved in the bright city, or in the sky, or in the land around it.

  Were they people, like the Burrowers, who couldn’t bear light?

  No, she decided finally. People sensitive to light did not build cities under a hot sun.

  Then what? She swallowed drily, uneasy with the thought that crossed her mind. She shouldered her pack again and rose.

  Finally she reached the edge of the great shadow spilling across the bone-dry ground. She stopped, tired, sweating, her face pale with dust and stared up at the sheer bluff of stone. Then she looked down at her feet.

  No other footprints.

  She slid her hands over her mouth, suddenly panicked, preferring aliens to the chilly silence of the city’s emptiness.

  “There must be someone!” she whispered. “There must be!”

  She began to walk again, doggedly, into the shadow.

  The city was like nothing she had ever seen. Massive yet translucent, like the Dome, it had been built with an astonishing degree of sophistication. Stairways wandered up and down the walls; chambers she thought might be elevators clung to various levels like bubbles. The great domes and cylinders must house generators, power plants, factories, air docks. If the people who built the city had traveled by land, their roads had long been buried under the dust. Perhaps they were an air-faring people, preferring the sky to the barren land, preferring the security of their walls to the restless wind and harsh storms.

  But where had they come from? Not from the water-planet, surely; the people there had no concept of cities. They lived in a fluid, shifting environment; they wouldn’t imagine a city resting on a flat, still surface. Still, if they had such a dream, it might look something like this: delicate, light-filled, shapes clustered together like bubbles in foam.