The Moon and the Face

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She reached the outer wall. An elevator hung over her head. She pushed a dusty button beside a stairway. Nothing happened. Looking closer, she saw the white stairs had been built to move. They moved no longer; dust must have choked their mechanisms long ago. Dust lay undisturbed; nothing had climbed them recently but the sun.

  She began to climb. She plunged from light into shadow. She counted two hundred steps, then stopped counting. Would anyone of a water-world build all those steps? She was tempted to remove her pack, but she was afraid of forgetting where she had left it. Finally she found a door. It was round, convex, like a half-bubble. And it was partly open.

  She peered inside.

  Hundreds and hundreds of white rods of varying shape and size hung suspended from the ceiling of the room. Kyreol stared at them, her mouth open. Eggs, she decided finally. Alien eggs. The rods were motionless, dusty. She reached out eventually, after a long time, and touched one with the tips of her fingers. It hummed slightly, then fell like a ripe fruit ready to drop at a breeze, and shattered to pieces on the floor.

  She fell against the door in horror, hiding her face in her hands. The sound clanged in her ears. Then the silence fell again, smothering, cloying, like the dust.

  She wiped tears off her face, felt the mask of powder on it. That made her more miserable. I’ll stay here and get buried like everything else. Then she thought, Maybe they’re not eggs. Maybe it’s a kind of…a kind of…

  What?

  An energy source? A library? An information storage? Part of a vast computer?

  “If there’s a computer, maybe there’s a communications system,” she said aloud. “Maybe I can call the Dome. If I can find it. If I can recognize it. If it still works.” She moved among the rods, feeling her mind starting to work again. “Maybe there’s a little air shuttle. I can fly it above the surface and look for Joss.” She reached another bubble door. It opened easily, melting in half into the wall. “What kind of people would have built fat round doors?”

  Bubble-people. They rolled from room to room. She laughed suddenly at her own invention. The laugher echoed into silence.

  The next room was a vast, domed area. It was full of huge white cylinders and ovals, each with softly translucent screens and what looked like a code system of lights. But none of the lights burned. The main computer? she guessed, remembering the one in the Dome that constantly told her she was doing something wrong. She glanced behind her abruptly, terrified of getting lost within the city. Her footprints marched behind her without a break.

  “I’ll find a shuttle,” she whispered, then. “I’ll find Joss.” An airship she might possibly fly; the computer was too formidable. “I don’t know enough,” she protested tightly. “I’m too ignorant for this.”

  She crossed the huge room, opened another bubble-door. This room, too, was full of rods. But they were different: heavier, crystal-clear, prismed. Late sunlight struck them through a window; a membrane of color trembled in the air like a butterfly wing.

  Someone was singing.

  Kyreol’s knees buckled; she sat down in the dust. Her mouth dried; her heart seemed to leap up and down on her stomach. The voice roamed aimlessly from tone to tone; sometimes it buzzed like a bee, sometimes it sounded like a high-pitched stringed instrument. Whoever owned it was coming closer.

  A shadow loomed across the bubble-door. Kyreol shut her eyes. She heard the door open. The singing wailed upward into a high, loud, wobbly note, as something shuffled inside.

  Half a dozen rods, vibrating overtones, crashed to the ground and splintered.

  The singer gave a yip of shock. Kyreol buried her face in her knees and screamed.

  Silence fell once again over the city.

  5

  THE HEALER lay in a restless weave of smoke, fire, shadow. Terje, stepping slowly into the small room, smelled herbs again, and some sweetly burning wood and, beneath that, the Healer’s sweat. He was lying quietly. His face was much thinner than Terje remembered. His eyes were closed. The woman beckoned to Terje, made him sit on the carpet beside the bed. Her eyes, preoccupied until then, stayed on Terje’s face in sudden curiosity. Her son, Korre, had been betrothed to Kyreol. Kyreol had left him, had vanished completely with Terje. And here was Terje, four Moon-Flashes later, come back out of nowhere, dressed as a hunter, yet telling no one he had returned.

  He was a dream, a ghost. The Healer had called him up from the dead. She touched him tentatively as he sat gazing at the Healer. He turned, startled. The sadness, the confusion in his expression, the sweat already gathering on his face, the smudges of sleeplessness under his eyes told her he was no ghost. A boy had gone somewhere; a young man had returned.

  But from where?

  She asked nothing; that was for the Healer to do. Instead, she put a cup of tea in Terje’s hands. He drank it mechanically. It was scalding and very bitter. Some protection against fever, perhaps. As soon as he set the cup down, though, he felt disoriented, almost as if he were watching himself from one of the shadows. A dream-tea. The Healer’s eyes opened. He looked at Terje silently, his dark eyes expressionless, unblinking, until Terje felt all his memories of the past years become as a dream in his head, a curious story. The Riverworld was the real world.

  He drew a deep breath, knowing that all of Nara’s careful rules and regulations meant nothing in this situation. The Healer’s mind had reached out into the darkness and found him, in spite of all Terje’s skill and training. He was a dying man. Those he had loved most in the world had left him without a trace. Only Terje had returned.

  He has a right, Terje said silently, stubbornly, to Regny, to Nara, to all the agents who were even now moving in secret, in primitive disguises, among the tiny, ancient cultures of the world. He has a right to truth.

  The Healer’s face softened; his eyes smiled faintly. Terje asked surprisedly, “Are you hearing my thoughts?”

  “Just the thoughts on your face.” He lifted one hand, patted Terje’s arm weakly. “I’m glad you came back.”

  Terje swallowed. He touched the Healer’s cheek briefly with the back of his fingers. It was very hot. “What happened?” he asked huskily. “What’s making you sick?”

  “Something from the air.” He closed his eyes briefly, his brow furrowing. Fever, Terje thought. It might have been anything—virus, insect bite, bacteria from the water. Children were more prone to unidentified fevers; in adults, they were rare and deadly.

  The Healer’s fingers tightened on his arm, bringing Terje out of his thoughts. Icrane’s eyes were wide open again. He looked past Terje, to Korre’s mother.

  “You must go now,” he said to her gently. “For a little while. Terje will tell me what he has been dreaming for so long.”

  Korre’s mother rose reluctantly. She wiped the sweat from the Healer’s face, then gave the cloth to Terje, whispering, “I won’t go far. Call if he needs help.”

  Terje nodded. The door opened; the smoke swirled, then drew once more toward the roof. The Healer frowned again, more in bewilderment than pain.

  “Where did you go, Terje? I have had such strange dreams of you and Kyreol. I knew you were alive. Like Nara. But where is there to go that is not the Riverworld?”

  “We went—We followed the River to its end.”

  “How? Tell me how.”

  Terje told him how they had gone to see the rainbows at Fourteen Falls and almost killed themselves going down the Falls. How they had met people living in the cliffs beyond the Falls—

  The Healer shifted, amazed. “Is this true, Terje? Or did you dream it?”

  “It’s true,” Terje said softly. “Dreams don’t kill. We journeyed through the real world, full of fierce people, dangerous animals, the hot desert sun, the River itself…”

  “Is the world that big?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that strange?”

  “It’s stranger than anything you could dream.”

  The Healer shook his head, smiling again. “I’ve seen that
world already, I think. I’m glad you came back to explain my dreams to me.”

  A weight seemed to sag away from Terje; he leaned forward, bowed his head against the feather pallet, smelling the herbs scattered among the skins. His hands were closed tightly. “I was afraid to tell you… We are all afraid.”

  He felt the Healer’s hand on his hair, heard the surprise in his voice. “Is that why I never saw you again? Because you were all afraid?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Nara? Is that why my wife never returned to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you’re right,” Icrane said after a moment. “I don’t understand. Tell me more. Make me understand.”

  Terje straightened. He knew he should pick and choose among facts, make them simple, comprehensible, to a simple world. But something in the tea had jumbled everything in his head, made everything at once real and dreamlike, made nothing important except the small stone room, the fire, the Healer, walking toward death, gazing back at life, and wondering at it.

  “Are they well?” the Healer asked. “My wife and my daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you and Kyreol betrothed? You always liked her. I thought at first that was why you ran away.”

  “No. We—she wouldn’t have run away for that. We’re not betrothed. Well.” He stopped. “In a way, we are.”

  The Healer nodded. “In spirit. That’s important.”

  “I didn’t know you thought that way.”

  “Rituals don’t permit such thoughts. But dreams do… I know them both. And Nara?” His voice was suddenly wistful. “Is she bound in spirit also? To someone else?”

  Terje shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think she left her heart here.”

  Icrane drew a long, silent breath, loosed it as silently. “Then why,” he whispered almost fiercely, “has she never returned? I never stopped thinking of her. She ate my heart like the moon eats the sun.”

  Terje swallowed. He wiped the Healer’s face wordlessly, wishing he could concentrate. All his muscles had tensed again. He wished Regny were with him, guarding his words, telling him how much he should say.

  “She—the world is so different, at the end of the River,” he heard himself say. “Even the moon is different.” He stopped, suddenly frightened. Icrane’s eyes were on his face.

  “How is the moon different?”

  “The Moon-Flash came from that world. The people at the end of the River made the Moon-Flash.” He stopped again, floundering in the Healer’s silence. “The ritual is different there.”

  The Healer wasn’t breathing. Terje gazed at him, alarmed. The man’s eyes were focused on the shadows; soon he gave a soft sigh.

  “Boats,” he whispered. “Boats among the stars.”

  Terje’s skin prickled. “Yes.”

  “I dreamed that.”

  “She thought—she thought that for you to know such things would make you—would change the way you look at the Riverworld. That’s why she never came back. She was trying to protect you.”

  “Ah.” Icrane closed his eyes. His face, in the shifting light, seemed easier, more peaceful. Terje turned, added wood to the fire, scattered a handful of herbs from the bowl beside the firebed. “That,” he heard Icrane whisper, “I almost understand. Terje.”

  Terje turned back to him. Icrane opened his eyes; black, still, secret, they caught at Terje and held him. “Why are you here?” Icrane asked. His words were slow, frail. “I felt you here yesterday and the day before. You were in my dreams…a silent hunter standing among the trees. Yet no one spoke your name, and you never came to greet me, to tell me of Kyreol. Why? Where is Kyreol? Why isn’t she with you?”

  “Kyreol—” He had to stop to clear his throat. He felt blood rising in his face as he considered his words, like a man standing on a stone in a rapid, dangerous river, considering which stone to leap to next. “She’s on a journey. She’s very far away. Even if she dreams of you, she’s too far to come to you.”

  “Too far… How far is that?”

  “She’s—she’s beyond the moon.”

  Icrane gazed at him in wonder. “Kyreol?” He gave a faint laugh, startling Terje. “The River carried her a little farther than she expected…” Terje nodded wordlessly. Icrane reached out, brushed the feathers Terje wore. “Did you make this vest here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a hunter?”

  Terje ran his fingers through his hair. “I hunt,” he said finally. The Healer was gazing at him again, patiently, waiting for him to stop edging around the question. He scratched his head, wondering what on earth Regny would say to the Healer at this point. Inspiration came to him. “Nara sends me,” he said. “In secret, to find out how you are.”

  “But she won’t come herself.”

  “It’s a different world,” Terje said helplessly. “It’s huge, it’s noisy, it’s full of sharp edges and very few dreams. The people in it know of the Riverworld. They know how simple and peaceful it is, and they try to protect that peace. They don’t want the Riverworld to disappear into the noisy, crowded world.”

  Icrane lay very still, no longer looking at Terje. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes. Sometimes, I dreamed of that world. I never knew what it was, or where it might be.”

  “It’s at the end of the River.”

  “And they know of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Do they dream of us?”

  “No. They don’t dream very well. People just come like me, in secret. To watch. To guard the Riverworld against anything that might change it.”

  Icrane’s eyes went back to Terje. “You.”

  “That’s why I’m here. I didn’t—” He shook his head, swallowing at the sudden bum in his throat. “I didn’t know you were—I didn’t know—”

  Icrane was silent for a long time. His eyes were half-closed; he watched the flames, motionless, unblinking. Terje wondered if he were dreaming. He sat still with an effort. All his hunter’s tranquility seemed to have left him. He was sweating, half-scorched by the fire; his muscles were cramped from sitting. He felt alternately grieved, appalled by what he was saying, and awed by Icrane’s dreams and by his understanding. He wanted to stay by Icrane’s side; he wanted to go into the night, keep walking until he forgot everything except the dark, the singing trees, the River’s cool touch. He wanted to talk to Regny, and yet he was afraid to tell Regny how much he was explaining to Icrane.

  Am I doing what people have spent years being trained not to do? he wondered. Am I endangering the Riverworld?

  “They’ve forgotten how to dream,” he heard himself say to Icrane. “That’s why they want to protect the Riverworld from their world. They want the Riverworld always to remember how to dream. How to see.” He couldn’t tell if Icrane had heard him. Finally the Healer stirred, whispering for water, and Terje lifted Icrane’s head with his arm, held the water-skin so he could drink. The lines on Icrane’s face had deepened again; he moved restlessly when Terje loosed him, trying to escape from his pain.

  “Kyreol…”

  Terje leaned over him. “What?” The Healer’s fingers gripped him, hard. “Kyreol—”

  “What is it?” He was taking quick, dry breaths, staring at Icrane. The Healer made a sudden, harsh noise. He looked as if he were trying to see light in a lightless place. Terje felt the blood run out of his face.

  “Icrane!”

  “What kind of world have you found,” the Healer whispered, “where such things can happen?”

  “What happened?” He didn’t know he had shouted until Korre’s mother put her head in the door, and he saw a shadow that might have been Regny briefly cross a window. Icrane was still again, hardly breathing, his expression harsh, intent. Then, as Terje and Korre’s mother watched him, nearly breathless themselves, his face relaxed again and his feverish grip loosened.

  “That’s all right.” He sighed, his eyes closing. “She’ll be all right.”

  T
erje turned his head, looked at Korre’s mother. He was so shaken, so frightened that she lost some of her own fear and stepped softly into the room.

  “He must sleep, Terje.”

  “I know.” But as he shifted to stand, Icrane held him again, this time gently.

  “No. Don’t go. Stay with me. You have so many things to tell me and so few words to say them with. Maybe…there aren’t enough words in the Riverworld.”

  “Kyreol—” His voice trembled.

  “She’s having many strange dreams. Stay. Sleep beside me, Terje. You comfort me.”

  Korre’s mother put skins on the floor for him. He stretched out, listening to the Healer’s breathing. A tear hot as fire rolled across his arm. Then the soft chanting from the River slid him into shoals of sleep.

  6

  THERE WAS an argument going on in Kyreol’s head.

  Kyreol. Lift up your head and see what it is.

  No.

  How can you learn about aliens if you don’t look at them?

  Nobody said I had to do it alone.

  But you are alone. You have to.

  No.

  Then what are you going to do? Sit here with your eyes closed until you’re covered with dust?

  It’s better than seeing something that might scare me to death.

  But, Kyreol—

  No.

  But—

  She lifted her head slightly, peeked out at an angle above her arm, her eye half-hidden by her hair. She blinked. A big ball of iridescent fur leaned against the opposite wall near the door. It seemed to have no head. Where its head should have been, six fingers, rough and pointed like carrots, were interlaced. Two humps with what looked like various tools and instruments belted around them, rose underneath the fingers. Kyreol shifted to look out of both eyes. The humps descended into feet ringed with bright bracelets of fur. In the angle formed by the knees and the feet a single eye, surrounded by a perfect circle of black fur, gazed back at Kyreol.

  Kyreol lifted her head slowly. The eye rolled up into the fur. A soft, high note trembled in the air.