The Moon and the Face

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She sat up silently, amazed. It’s as scared as I am, she thought. Her hands felt like ice; her heart was pounding raggedly. And that’s pretty scared. Now what do I do? She whispered, “Joss, what do I do?”

  The creature hummed again, gently, so not to break more rods. Its eye was still hidden. Kyreol, her voice trembling and cracked with terror, hummed the same note back at it.

  The eye opened again. The fingers shifted slightly. Something very small and furry bulged briefly underneath the hands. A second eye opened above the first.

  It studied Kyreol for a long time, then turned gradually from a pale pink to a deep purple. A third eye opened.

  Kyreol jumped, startled. All the eyes disappeared at once.

  She sat very still again, terrified and fascinated at the same time. The instruments dangling from the creature’s kneebelts looked sleek, complex, the tools of the explorer. But it was using none of them. Not even a communicator to call one of its kind and say: I’m alone in a room with an alien with a black face and a silver body. It has only two eyes, and they’re in the wrong place. Please come—I’d be doing that, Kyreol thought, if I had anyone to call. She watched another little lump of fur burrow into the deep fur around the shoulders Will it attack me? she wondered nervously. If I stand up? Does it have teeth? Will it shoot me with something?

  One eye opened again, cautiously. A faint, brief hum curled up into the air, like a question. Kyreol tried to imitate it; her voice only squeaked like a mouse.

  The creature shifted. All its eyes opened. Its hands unlocked very slowly. As its shoulders lowered, all the vague little movements on them ceased. Its head rose from between its knees.

  Its long neck retracted. Its head was a mound of pure white fur. The eyes were ringed with black; the oval pupils were purple. It had no teeth; its mouth was a hard, shiny white beak. The humming came from two moist, mobile slits on the sides of its beak. It sat back against the wall, studying Kyreol out of three eyes. Then the center eye closed. Its hands opened, stroked the small, quivering, brightly colored fur-balls that circled its shoulders and front like a chain. A fine, faint, very high sound, like a musical purr of many tiny voices, drifted up from under its hands.

  Kyreol’s mouth opened. “Babies?” she breathed, and at the new sound, the long bony fingers stilled.

  The eyes paled nervously, but the creature didn’t curl up again. Kyreol smiled, half in wonder, half in relief, and the beak opened in another startled yip.

  “Oh please,” Kyreol pleaded. “Don’t disappear again. Look. I’m not moving. I’m sitting still. It’s just me, Kyreol. I’m nothing to be afraid of.” All the eyes were closed again. But instead of curling in fear, the being rested its head against the white wall, wailing softly to itself like a mournful, perfectly pitched violin.

  Kyreol’s fear eased. She sat transfixed, her chin in her hands, wondering how in the world she could talk to something that made noises through its nose like an orchestra. What is it saying? Probably: ‘What am I doing here on this empty moon, I wish I were home…’ But where is its ship? Did it crash like us? If it’s so terrified, why is it even here? How can I ask?

  And then, alarmed again, she thought: Mothers are sometimes dangerous. Will it think I’m a threat if I stand?

  She sat very still, then. They gazed at one another across the room; the creature’s eyes paled occasionally at some fearful thought of its own. The younglings stopped moving after a while; they looped their parent’s neck in a bright, lumpy chain. Napping, Kyreol thought, and sighed. Now what? I’m here, it’s there, we can’t talk to each other, and neither one of us is going to move. What if it bites? Space explorers, she knew, usually didn’t bite other aliens. But if it was an explorer, why was it so frightened?

  It was moving. It lifted one bony hand from the ring of young, held it out. Its fingers closed, uncurled. Closed, uncurled. An alien greeting? Kyreol lifted her hand very carefully. The alien fingers curled, uncurled. One finger at a time.

  One. Two. Three.

  “Oh,” she breathed, and opened her own fingers. “One.” Her voice sounded peculiar in the dead air, still shaking, and high as a child’s. “Two. Three. Four. Five.”

  Then she waited, her mouth open in astonishment, while the creature went through an amazing confusion of sounds. First the white beak clicked, a brittle, insect-sound. Then the beak-vents made noises like a steam whistle, a windstorm, a tree full of monkeys, a horn, a bass drum, a pool of boiling mud, a window breaking, a foghorn, the beginning of a symphony, and finally, a ghostly voice that vaguely resembled Kyreol’s, saying: “One.”

  Kyreol stared at it, stunned. It held one finger up Its beak made a brief series of clicks, like a code. One, Kyreol thought after a moment. One. Her mouth was still hanging open. She closed it. The only thing she had to click with was her teeth, and the beak noises were far too rapid. The alien finger closed after a moment. They gazed at one another again perplexedly.

  It had no eyebrows, Kyreol realized. Where her own face was mobile with expression, the furry, beaked face could only change its eye color. No wonder it had been startled when she smiled.

  Now what? she thought again. Here we are, two aliens stuck in a dead city on a strange moon. How can we talk? Then she stared down at the dust on the floor.

  Pictures.

  She stood up. The creature mourned a little, but its eyes didn’t close. She walked slowly, noiselessly, to the center of the room. There, with a clearer sense of the size of the alien, her courage faltered. No closer, its silence seemed to warn. No closer. She knelt down and began to draw.

  “This is the sun.” Her voice wobbled in the still air. “These are the seven planets. Corios. Xtal. Niade.” She drew large circles with her forefinger, so that the alien could see them where it sat. “Thanos, Chance, Tliklok, Septa. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I am from Thanos.” She pointed to herself, then at the planet. “Four.” She added a moon. Then she pointed to the third planet. “Three.” She surrounded that one with moons. “Niade. Number Three. This is where we are now. On one of its moons.” Her hand swept over them. She sat back, shrugging. “I don’t know which one.”

  The creature’s eye had turned an even deeper purple. It made some rapid clicks. Then it rose, about seven feet, making Kyreol’s heart turn over. From its knee-belt, it selected a small instrument. What have I said? Kyreol thought wildly. It’s going to shoot me. But it pointed the instrument at the wall it had been leaning against. The wall flushed blue-black, patterned with an icy swirl of stars.

  “A star map,” Kyreol breathed. The forefinger made a shadow across the map, pointing to a sun. Then it pointed at Kyreol. Your sun. The shadow shifted to a neighboring star, bigger, with a bluish glow. It tapped the top of its white mound. Mine, the tap said.

  Kyreol swallowed drily, frozen on the floor.

  “You’re not even from this system.”

  7

  TERJE WOKE suddenly under a shaft of light. The door was open; he saw Korre’s mother, bending over the river, filling skins. He looked at the Healer. He seemed to be sleeping quietly; his breathing was soft and slow. Terje sat up, memories of the previous night jumbled in his head along with his dreams. Things he had told the Healer came back to him. Or had he only dreamed of saying them? He wished, fervently, that he had. He felt bone tired. The smell of earth, herbs, wood smoke stirred older memories in him. He watched needles of dancing light on the water through the open doorway, listened to the distant, daily noises of the Riverworld. Children swimming, women calling to one another across the water…

  I’m home, he thought, strangely satisfied. Then he remembered Kyreol and the Healer’s vision of her, and the frail peace vanished. He got to his feet, wanting the warmth of the morning. Korre’s mother returned. She smiled and handed him some nut-bread and berries for breakfast.

  “I’ll be back,” he whispered to her. “Tell him, when he wakes. I won’t be gone long.”

  He kept to the thick parts of the for
est, wanting to avoid questions, heading downriver toward the hidden campsite. Birds called brightly, soared through the light around him. He felt, for a little while, that he could simply disappear into his hunter’s role, treat the Dome as a dream, become Terje of the Riverworld, eating berries and fish and worrying about nothing. Except the Healer. And Kyreol. And how to go on being an unobserved observer when most of the Riverworld must have heard his name called into the night…

  And Regny.

  He found Regny at their hidden camp, sitting on a rock with a line in the water. His steps were soundless on the warm sand; Regny looked up, startled, as Terje’s shadow fell over him. Terje sat down beside him.

  “How is he?” Regny asked.

  “He’s sleeping. Regny—”

  “Nothing’s biting this morning, and I’m starving.”

  “Try some turtle eggs. Regny—” His voice stuck. He sighed and found it again. “I think I just broke every rule I was ever taught.”

  “I know you did,” Regny said calmly.

  “How much did you hear?”

  “Everything.” He began coiling his line and added, “The Healer broke a few rules himself. He wasn’t supposed to know from his dreams you were here. He wasn’t supposed to send someone to call out your name in front of the entire Riverworld. And he certainly wasn’t supposed to be dreaming about spaceships.”

  “He dreamed about Kyreol.”

  “I know. I heard you shout. Did he say what—”

  “No.” He dug absently in the sand. “I’ll ask him again today, if he’s well enough to talk. Is Nara going to be angry with me?”

  Regny smiled a little. “She’ll be grateful you are here. This business of us sneaking around in feathers while people from the Riverworld are flying around in space and dreaming of the Dome is getting a little incongruous. And we could cure the Healer.”

  Terje looked at him. “Do you want me to tell him that?” he asked. His voice was sharp with a sudden confusion. “The Agency tells me one thing. You tell me another. Am I supposed to decide whether he lives or dies? I can’t do it, Regny, I just can’t. This isn’t the Dome, it’s the Riverworld—death is as much a part of life as dreams here. At least, the Healer believes that. Do you want me to tell him it’s not true?”

  “No.” Regny sighed. “No.” He put his hand on Terje’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I was just sounding off at the Agency, not you. It’s certainly not a decision for you to make. You’ve had to make far too many already.” He paused, his eyes on Terje’s weary face. “You can go back to the Dome, you know. Nobody expected you to have to go through this.”

  Terje shook his head. “I couldn’t leave him,” he said softly. He folded his arms across his knees and brooded, gazing at the swift green water. He thought of Kyreol, missed her; he wanted her arms around him, passing her strength to him through her bones and her thoughts. “I wonder what’s happening to her?” he whispered. Regny took river weed from his hook and cast his line out again.

  “I don’t know,” he said grimly. “But as soon as I get some breakfast, I’m making another trip to the Outstation. If anyone knows what’s happening on Xtal, Nara will know. I’ll make it back to the Healer’s house sometime in the night. So if you need me, check outside.”

  “She was right to send you,” Terje said suddenly, looking at Regny. “She was right. I’d be terrified without you.”

  He returned to the Healer’s house at midmorning. The Healer was awake, stirring uneasily; when Terje entered, though, he smiled. His face had a shadowy-gray cast, and he shivered, in spite of the fire and the thick furs over him.

  “I’m glad you weren’t a dream,” he said.

  “No,” Terje said. “I’m here.” He sat down beside the pallet. Icrane quieted, gazing into his face almost curiously, as though he could see the end of the River and the Dome in Terje’s eyes. Korre’s mother, stirring broth over the fire, crouched down, as unobtrusively as possible. Icrane glanced at her, as if he could feel her listening. But he let her stay.

  “Tell me more,” he said to Terje, “about your strange dreaming in the world at the end of the River. What kinds of rituals do they have? Do they have a Healer to explain their dreams?”

  They don’t have rituals, Terje thought. They don’t have a Healer and they don’t explain dreams. He groped through his memories, trying to find something that might seem like a ritual, so that the Healer wouldn’t worry about Kyreol living in a place unsuitable for human beings.

  He told the Healer how he and Kyreol studied every day, about how they got their food, since there were no hunters, about rituals for births and death and miscellaneous things, like a first moon flight. He couldn’t tell how much the Healer understood. His eyes never moved from Terje’s face, but he seemed to be thinking more of something behind Terje’s words: the tone of his voice, or the expressions in his eyes.

  “Are you content there?” the Healer asked simply. Terje paused, realizing that he hadn’t asked himself that in a long time. The Dome was the Dome; it didn’t offer contentment, but challenges. It paid little attention to dreams, but it had opened his eyes to the endless shapes of reality.

  “Kyreol is there,” he answered finally. “It’s the place we came to, together.” They had learned too much; there was no turning back.

  “You don’t long for the Riverworld?”

  “Sometimes,” Terje admitted.

  “I look in your eyes and see the River flowing there,” Icrane whispered. He put his hand over his own eyes suddenly, withdrawing from the light, and turned, uneasy with pain. Korre’s mother came to his side.

  “He needs to sleep now,” she said gently. “You go. But not too far.”

  Terje went outside to sit on the bank where the Healer’s boat was moored. There were children fishing downriver, diving off their small boat, splashing one another. Women washing clothes glanced in his direction, but didn’t call to him. A fisherman poling upriver nodded to him, but didn’t speak. They viewed him with great courtesy and a little fear, as if he were a visiting ghost. What his coming meant no one knew, but no one dared ask. He was the Healer’s business.

  Korre’s mother came out, stood beside him.

  “He’s dreaming,” she said. She didn’t seem to be afraid of Terje any more. He was the same Terje, only four years older, who had sat glowering at Kyreol’s betrothal to her son, and who had at last run away with her. Where he had returned from she couldn’t imagine; she only knew that he was too distressed to be a ghost and that the Healer valued his presence.

  Terje looked up at her. “Will he die?”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly; she gazed down at the water.

  “A day or two perhaps…” she said softly. “He is more peaceful now that you’ve come.”

  Terje swallowed. He frowned down at his reflection, feeling hollow, disoriented in the placid afternoon. The Riverworld without Icrane seemed impossible.

  “Who will—who will take his place?”

  She shrugged slightly, unconcerned. “The Healer will know.” She touched his shoulder, patted it comfortingly, as if he were one of her children. “Come and have some soup.”

  Later in the afternoon, after the Healer had wakened and drunk a strong, soothing tea, Terje asked him about Kyreol. He didn’t answer for a moment; he gazed at the fire, his thoughts straying into some dream-memory.

  “Kyreol…”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I saw her flying…through the stars. And suddenly, a star fell out of the sky and struck her and she fell… There was great fear, terror…”

  “But she’s all right,” Terje breathed.

  “Yes…” The lines of his face puckered slightly, at some curious vision. “I don’t understand the things I see. They’re like pictures drawn by a strange people. But she is moving among them. Kyreol of the Riverworld…” He made a soft noise, half laughter, half wonder. Then his eyes came back from the distance and he looked at Terje.

  “Talk to me. Tell
me more about your journey down the River. What other things did you see beyond Fourteen Falls?”

  So Terje told him about the long gold desert, the marvelous animals that roamed it, about the great, grim stone faces rising out of the river reeds, and the bones that had fallen at Kyreol’s feet as she traced the story carved on the back of one of the stem faces. That made the Healer chuckle again, though he seemed surprised at the ritual.

  “How strange to lock the dead in stone…”

  It was as if he were listening to a marvelous story. Terje didn’t know how much he believed, if any of it. He told the Healer about the boy with the bells, the desert-child, kin to the Moon, and about the man sent by the Dome to help them on their journey. He intended to say no more about Regny than that, but at the mention of his name, a spark of recognition flashed in the Healer’s eyes. He touched Terje’s wrist, stopping him.

  “Yes… I’ve seen him many times.”

  Terje stared at him. “Regny?”

  “At rituals… I see him standing at the edge of the firelight, or alone among the trees. For years I thought he was a ghost, the hunter who wandered so quietly, unexpectedly, in and out of the Riverworld. He didn’t mean for me to see him, so I never disturbed him. He was part of the River’s dreaming.” He added, “So the River’s end sent him to guide you and Kyreol.”

  Terje nodded mutely. He thought how horrified Regny would be, knowing that his presence had been secretly tolerated by the Healer for years. “How did—how did you know Regny wasn’t one of the Riverworld hunters?”

  “I know,” the Healer said simply. “He looked no different from anyone. But when I saw him, he always made my eyes pause. Something… Maybe it was his thoughts. They must have been different from Riverworld thoughts, like a strange sound in a forest.”

  “He’s here now,” Terje said abruptly. It seemed useless to hide anything from the Healer.

  “So…he guided you back to the Riverworld.” He was silent then, for so long that Terje thought he had gone to sleep with his eyes open. Korre’s mother, sewing a betrothal shirt for one of her daughters, glanced at him anxiously now and then, but his face was untroubled, his eyes as remote as if he were sitting on the moon and thinking. Terje rose after a while, wandering outside, back down to the water. The sun was about to set; long, pale fingers of light stroked the ground. He could smell supper being cooked: fish, onion soup. He heard a baby crying, the birds singing the sun down. The moon had already risen; it hung like a faint, ghostly face in the wake of dying light. The brief, golden days, the nut harvests, the autumn star patterns; he felt the urge toward ritual, a childhood habit, and a habit as old as the history of the Riverworld. Even in the Dome he had felt it, he realized suddenly. He still kept coming back at ritual time; he had found a job that permitted him to return, like a ghost himself, drawn by the ancient patterns of his heritage.