The Moon and the Face Read online

  Praise for Patricia A. McKillip’s Moon-Flash

  “Rare…beautiful…a lovely work.”

  —Science Fiction Review

  “Absorbing…lyrical… The reader is drawn into Kyreol’s world, exploring it with her and sharing the insights that come to her.”

  —Fantasy Review

  “A fully successful move into new territory…the eloquence will satisfy all McKillip fans.”

  —Locus

  “Marvelously imaginative…a great deal of action and adventure…highly recommended.”

  —Rochester Post-Bulletin

  “Fascinating…striking…vividly detailed.”

  —Desert News

  “A powerhouse of ideas—The reader travels…through the ages of humankind.”

  —English Journal

  “A tale of discovery…interesting…romantic… This book is good fun to read.”

  —Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum

  Berkley books by Patricia A. McKillip

  THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

  THE MOON AND THE FACE

  MOON-FLASH

  STEPPING FROM THE SHADOWS

  This Berkley book contains the complete

  text of the original hardcover edition.

  THE MOON AND THE FACE

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  Atheneum Publishers

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Argo Book edition published 1985

  Berkley edition / October 1986

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1985 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

  by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: Argo Books, Atheneum Publishers,

  597 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  ISBN: 0-425-09206-2

  A BERKLEY BOOK ® TM 757,375

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  The name “BERKLEY” and the stylized “B” with design

  are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  1

  TERJE SAT on the bank of the River, gazing at the reeds and yellow flowers that filled the shallows. He was just south of Arin Thrase’s museum; he had walked there in three days from Domecity. He was waiting for Kyreol.

  A hawk circled above his head, gold as the desert the river divided. A bullfrog droned somewhere among the reeds. The sun had just risen; the slow green water misted toward the light. Terje sat very quietly, letting thoughts slide through his head like cloud reflections sliding across the water. He was dressed in skins and a feather vest. A feather band around his thigh held his knife; a pocket inside one soft boot held his com-crystal. He had let his hair grow shaggy for a few weeks. Leaning over the water, that dawn, he had painted his face. The face gazing back at him belonged to two people: Terje of the Dome and a young hunter of the Riverworld, tall and muscular, his fair skin and hair burned gold with sunlight, his face calm, motionless from long hours of listening for the stir of animals in the brush.

  He saw silver flash in the water and turned his head. The little pickup craft Kyreol flew was virtually soundless, for the stations they flew to were often deep in protected territory. It was landing now, not so silently, kicking up dust from the hot, arid ground. Terje, who had spent the past days in solitude beside the peaceful River, blinked at the craft as if it had fallen off a star. Then he gathered his few belongings and rose.

  Kyreol opened one door of the pickup craft; Regny Orcrow, also dressed in feathers, opened the other. Terje stared at him, surprised; he kissed Kyreol, leaving a smudge of paint on her face, before he spoke.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked Regny. “You said this time I was going to the Riverworld alone.”

  “I know,” Regny said.

  “It’s just the early autumn ritual.”

  “I know,” Regny said again. “I know what I said.” He leaned against the pickup craft, his vest of dappled gold and dark feathers looking a little bedraggled. A crow feather drifted to the ground. Kyreol grinned.

  “You’re moulting.”

  Regny sighed. “I was supposed to have a new vest made before I went back up.”

  Terje slid his fingers through his hair. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “It’s my mother,” Kyreol said. “She changed her mind.”

  Regny shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ve been training for four years; you’ve been to the Riverworld with me or another agent over a dozen times. I thought you were more than ready to observe by yourself, since you know the Riverworld so well. Nara said she thought so, too. But this morning she changed her mind. She told me to come with you. She’s the boss.”

  “But why?” Terje said again, patiently, looking at Kyreol. She shook her head a little, her dark face perplexed.

  “We didn’t have much time to talk. She just—I don’t know. Maybe she had a dream about you that worried her, so she decided to send Regny.”

  “What could happen to me in the Riverworld?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Terje. You could fall out of a tree; you could eat a bad musk-berry; you could shoot yourself by accident—”

  “With an arrow?” He was smiling, remembering then the long hours they had spent together before he had gone upriver. The sun caught in her eyes; she laughed, suddenly very close to him, though he couldn’t remember which of them had moved. He touched her cheek, thinking, at its sunlight darkness, of the black, immense slab of rock that had shrugged its way out of the earth to become, eons later, the northern boundary of the Riverworld. The child-woman Kyreol, betrothed and swarming like a beehive with questions, had drawn him past the edge of the ancient Riverworld into the future. But she wasn’t a child now. She was Kyreol of the Dome, slender and tall in a silver flightsuit, with the reflection of the Face in her skin and the shadow of its secrets in her eyes.

  Their memories drew them closer; their mouths touched. Regny cleared his throat. “Come on. You’ll see each other again in six weeks. We have to fly halfway up this river by noon. You want me to pilot, Kyreol?”

  She shook her head. “I want to. I’m getting better at it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, I get distracted,” she explained, letting Terje in first. “There are so many things I want to look at, I just forget where I’m going.”

  “Oh, fine,” Regny grumbled. “Not only am I back to work when I’m supposed to be on vacation, but I’m in the hands of an absentminded pilot.” He climbed in, shedding a couple more feathers.

  Terje said suddenly, “She could have sent someone else. Another agent instead of you.”

  “She wanted me to come with you. That’s all I know. I don’t know why. She just told me to go…” He was silent, his black face indrawn, unblinking: the face of the hunter, silent and full of mysteries, that had lured Kyreol years before beyond her world. When the engines had quieted and the small craft had begun its meandering course around the protected areas, he added, “I’ve known Nara about as long as I’ve known the Riverworld. That’s long enough to know that sometimes asking questions isn’
t the best way to get an answer. Sometimes you just wait.”

  “Was she upset about something?”

  “What I’m trying to say,” Regny said patiently, “is that she didn’t know why either.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. She wouldn’t send you to the Riverworld for six weeks without a good reason.”

  “She had a good reason.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “She wasn’t sure.” He caught Terje’s eye and smiled. “Don’t worry. Kyreol must be right. Nara probably just had a dream, and maybe she couldn’t remember what it was, but it had something to do with you, so she thought she’d better send me—”

  “Why didn’t she just tell me not to go?” Terje asked bewilderedly. “If it was that important?”

  “Oh, Terje,” Kyreol said. “You’re not listening.”

  “I am listening. And I’m making more sense than anyone else.”

  “You’re only listening with your ears. She just knew she should send Regny. That’s all. So she did. Later, you’ll know why.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel very secure.”

  “Terje, if you were going to be in danger, she wouldn’t have let you go. Besides, nothing ever happens in the Riverworld.”

  “That doesn’t make—” He stopped, sighing. Regny reached back, gripped his shoulder lightly.

  “Don’t worry about it. You can go alone next time. The only thing I’m worrying about is whether or not this vest will hang together for six weeks. I hate sewing feathers.”

  The land flowed beneath them like a gold sea, barren and wrinkled, scarred with heat, sculpted by wind. Only the River, burrowing out of the northern forests, gave it a fiercely glittering thread of color. Near noon, the dust began to melt into green. The land reared upward, jaggedly, on both sides of the River. The tangled brush and stunted trees flowed into vast, deep forest, stretching northward as far as the eye could see. A tree flashed beneath them, another—

  “Bring it up,” Regny murmured, and Kyreol eased the small craft upward.

  She said apologetically, “My eyes keep wanting to watch things, and then my hands follow my eyes…” Her voice sank to an awed whisper. “Look at that. I never knew it was so beautiful.”

  Ahead, the Face rose out of the forest, the great black cliff half-hidden beneath the rainbow-filled mist of its Falls. A deep lake set like a jewel in solid stone was the birthplace of the Falls. The river fed the lake, coming southward from yet another blue-black forest; far, far ahead, there was another thumbprint of black rising above the trees, another face of stone crowned with another lake…

  “It’s like steps down the world,” Kyreol breathed. “A giant’s threshold.”

  “You’re over protected area,” Regny said quickly. “You overshot the landing point.”

  “Where?” She angled away from the forest just as her receiver crackled.

  “North Outstation Five to PC103D. What course are you trying to follow?”

  “It’s me, Kyreol. I’m coming down.”

  “Kyreol!” exclaimed the voice. “Welcome back. Try not to land on my roof.”

  “There,” Terje said, looking down at a bald spot near the western edge of the forest, just at the line where the river mists yielded to the sun and the desert reclaimed the land once more. Kyreol was silent, concentrating. They flew on a level with the treetops. Then they were down, bumping across the ground, the ancient trees towering over them.

  They got out tiredly, stretching. The birds were settling back into the trees, little flashes of lemon, chartreuse, scarlet, scolding fiercely. Then they subsided, and there was just the wind, with its invisible weave of messages Terje was learning to separate: animal smells, the smell of honey, the smell of rain.

  He saw Kyreol, her arms folded as she lounged against the pickup craft, watching him wistfully. He had vanished for a moment, behind his hunter’s face. He was doing something she would never permit herself to do: returning to the Riverworld, disappearing back into a memory, a dream.

  He went to her, put his arms around her. “I’ll miss you,” he said softly. “It’s always strange, being there without you. It’s my home, the place where I was born, but I can’t speak to anyone, I can’t let myself be seen, I’m invisible… I visit all the places you and I explored when we were little, but you’re not there anymore.”

  “I’m glad Regny’s with you. Six weeks is a long time to be invisible.”

  “It will go fast.”

  “I’ll miss you.” She sighed. “I won’t have anything to do but work. Except… There’s something I haven’t told you. I didn’t want to tell you, because I didn’t want you to think about it while you were here. But maybe I should, because if you have any peculiar dreams with me in them, dreams that don’t make sense—”

  “Kyreol—”

  “Don’t worry about them; I’ll be back before you get back and you won’t even know I’ve been gone—”

  “What—”

  “I’m just going to Xtal.”

  “Xtal,” he said blankly, his hands slack on her shoulders. Then he shouted, “Kyreol, that’s another planet!”

  The birds started squawking again. Regny, who was unloading their gear, turned to stare at Terje.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s going to another planet!”

  “Just Xtal,” Regny said soothingly. “That’s not far.”

  “It’s—it’s—” He gestured wordlessly, his hands arcing above his head. Kyreol nodded, her brows crinkled.

  “Well, Terje,” she said reasonably. “This is what the Agency has been training me for. To study small cultures like the Riverworld, only on other planets. How can I study them if I never see them?”

  “Why do you have to see them now?” he demanded unreasonably. “Now, while I’m here in the wilderness, instead of at the Dome, where I’ll know if you’ve landed safely, if you—Kyreol, it’s not like a river journey. If you fall out, there’s nothing to swim in, there’s no shore to swim to—”

  “It’s a little hard to fall out of a spaceship.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know, but there’s nothing to worry about. Joss Tappan’s been in space a hundred times; he’ll be with me. I’ll only be there three weeks; I’ll be back before you are. If you’d like, I’ll send a message to the Outstation when I do get back. And I’ll pick up you and Regny when you’re ready to come back. I promise: Nothing will happen to me.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  She was silent. She put her arms around him suddenly, her cheek against his cheek. “Because I’m scared,” she said softly, and felt his arms circle her. “It’s not the dark I see in dreams that I’m going into. It’s a night of nothing. It’s just a means of getting from point to point, but it’s so vast, and the planet I’m going to is so different, that how will I remember who Kyreol is? I don’t know if you can take your past from planet to planet.” She stopped, laughing a little. “I’m not saying it right. It’s just—It will be different. I hope I won’t be different, with my mind full of alien things.”

  He drew back from her slightly, looked at her, as if he were almost hearing something she wasn’t saying. “You’re the same Kyreol I grew up with in the Riverworld. Living in the Dome changed some things about you, but not—not the things I love.”

  “I know.” Her eyes were hidden against him; her voice came muffled by his collarbone. “One thing changed. I could never go back to the Riverworld.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it. She lifted her head quickly, then, smiling. “It will be all right. In six weeks, I’ll come and get you. I’ll tell you stories about the Burrowers of Xtal. They live in caves because they can’t endure light; their eyes are huge, like owls’ eyes, only colorless, and they paint the future on their walls.”

  He didn’t smile. He brushed her cheek gently with his fingers. “Did you have a dream?” he asked. The forest was very still; Regny, who was filling the inner
pockets of his boots with obscure, miniscule equipment, lifted his head to listen.

  “No. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. I try to see ahead, awake or asleep, and all I can see is—” She gave a little, helpless shrug. “Nothing.”

  “Kyreol. You’re scaring me.”

  “Oh—” She smiled again and kissed him swiftly. “I’ll see you again. That’s the only thing I do know.”

  ★

  HE THOUGHT about that, much later, as he lit a fire from a piece of flint, deep within the Riverworld. Regny had gone for water. They had hiked all afternoon; by evening they were close to the River, but down from the Face, away from the small stone houses along the banks. The flint sparked; a dry leaf flamed. He dropped it into a nest of dry twigs, then added wood slowly, nursing the fire patiently, tuned once again to the slow, painstaking habits of the Riverworld. The warmth touched his face. He sat back, thinking of Kyreol.

  Regny stepped into the circle of his fire so quietly he startled, then looked up as Regny slipped the water-skin straps off his shoulders and sat down.

  “Dinner ready?”

  Terje handed him some dried meat. Regny contemplated it. “For this I traveled half a continent.” He chewed a few moments, then said: “Seems quiet. I watched the moon rise above the Face. The whole river turned silk white. It made me remember why I came back. Why I keep coming back…”

  Terje lifted his face toward the stars, thick as pebbles in the bed of a deep black river. “Did you see any of the hunters?”

  “No.” He stopped, listening to a faint crackling in the dark. It subsided after a moment. “The only thing I saw that moved was a fire.”

  “This fire?”

  “No. It was upriver; it moved across the water. Somebody in a boat carrying a torch.”

  “That’s odd. Usually, if it’s night, they just go to sleep.” He added with his mouth full, “Anyway, on a night like this, who needs a torch?”

  They were silent. Twigs in the fire curled and snapped; sap keened. Something tiny scurried away from them. A bird cried once. Terje’s eyes rose from the fire; he questioned Regny puzzledly, wordlessly. Torchlight under a full moon? Fire on the water?