The Moon and the Face Read online

  “Lamplight, maybe, on a boat. But uncovered fire—that’s only for ritual. And it’s the wrong time of the year for that one.”

  “All right,” Regny said softly, and stood up. “Let’s take a walk and find out.”

  2

  THE DOME seemed almost unbearably bright and noisy to Kyreol when she returned: too full of people threading purposeful paths through intricate and bewildering machinery. The dock crew complimented her on her first flight alone. She responded tiredly, wishing there was something—a tree with a bird in it, a pool full of sunlight—she could rest her eyes on. The colors and smells of the Riverworld still lingered on the edge of her mind. She had already begun to miss Terje.

  She left the dock, took a central elevator up to the top of the Dome. The shields that protected the inner Dome from blazing light during the day were open to reveal the silver scythe of the moon and stars so thick they blurred together into a twinkling mist.

  She stopped beside the roof-garden, gazing up at the stars. The sheer numbers of them made her dizzy. She could scarcely find the pinprick of white fire to which she would be flying in two days. She felt a sudden, dismaying depression as she studied the night.

  All her excitement over the new journey, the unexplored place, had vanished.

  I’m just tired, she thought. But it’s so far away… So far from everything I know… I wish… But she didn’t know what she wished. She saw her mother, then, coming out of one of the circle of doors around the roof, and she smiled, feeling less lonely.

  Nara hugged her, as if she had been gone a month rather than a day. They were very much alike. Looking at her, Kyreol thought, was like looking at a reflection in still water. Only their voices were different. Nara’s was gentle, husky; she treated words carefully. Kyreol’s voice, bright, impulsive, usually showered words in the air like puffball seeds. But she was feeling quiet, then; she just said, “Everything went fine. I flew all the way, both ways.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Nara said. “But you look very tired. Come and eat supper.”

  “Terje was surprised to see Regny.”

  “I thought he might be.”

  Kyreol sighed. “I miss Terje.”

  “In two days,” Nara said, “you’ll be too busy to even think about him.” She opened the door to their small, elegant quarters. Music was playing; her scarlet and gold birds were singing to it. A rich, spicy smell from the kitchen hung in the air. Kyreol sniffed and some of her tiredness eased away.

  “You cooked for me!” In four years she had gotten used to food dried and frozen and summoned up out of a wall dispenser.

  “You and Joss Tappan. He’s joining us in a few moments.”

  “Oh.”

  Nara smiled. “Kyreol, he wants to talk to you a little more about your journey to Xtal. Go take a shower and change out of your flightsuit. You’ll feel more like thinking then.”

  Which, Kyreol discovered as she pulled a bright, loose robe over her head and combed out her wet hair, was true.

  Joss Tappan was sitting among Nara’s cushions when Kyreol came back out. She greeted him shyly, for though she liked him, she was awed by him. He was the Head of the Interplanetary Cultural Agency; his agency trained observers for other planets the way Nara’s trained them for the world below. He was a tall, fair-haired man with startling eyes in a deeply tanned face. His eyes were so clear they seemed almost colorless, like water. They reminded Kyreol of the eyes of the Burrowers of Xtal: luminous and full of secret visions.

  But he wasn’t a secretive man. He was open, friendly, and full of boundless curiosity about alien cultures. From him and his agents, Kyreol was learning three major off-world languages; she was studying the cultural histories of Xtal and Omolos, its inhabited moon; her head was full of dates, land-forms, strange rituals, and even stranger descriptions of aliens, the way they evolved into such unfamiliar shapes and why.

  He gestured to the cushions beside him, and she sat in a billow of fiery cloth. Nara had set their meal on a low table, so they could eat comfortably as they talked.

  “Are you looking forward to the journey, Kyreol?” Joss asked, and at the warm, expectant smile in his eyes, she began to feel once again the stirrings of excitement. Nara came in with hot bread and beer for Joss. She poured tea for herself and Kyreol, then sat down with them.

  “I’m excited,” Kyreol said, tearing a chunk of bread. “I’m also scared to death.”

  “That’s natural,” Joss said. “Some people love space flight. Others get space-sick; they can’t stand being away from Thanos, or they find themselves terrified of the vastness of space. We’ll see what kind of traveler you are. I heard you had a perfect flight to Outstation Five. That’s a good sign.”

  “Well. Not quite perfect. I was so busy looking at where the River came from, I forgot where I was going.”

  “I don’t blame you. It is beautiful up there.”

  “Is Xtal beautiful?”

  “Most of it looks like a dust bowl and smells like bad eggs,” Joss said cheerfully. “Some of the canyons of colored sand, the wastelands of obsidian, the lichen forests growing out of volcanic ash are to me amazingly beautiful. But then,” he added, smiling at her expression, “I can be pleased by almost anything. Except the smell of sulphur. We wear small filters, by the way, which purify the air of irritants.” He filled his plate with stew, then added, “That’s one way we learned that the Burrowers possess the ability of foresight. I was the first agent to visit them. When I entered their caves, the first thing I saw was a tall, fair-haired human with a nose filter on, painted on the cave wall. They couldn’t have seen me coming; they aren’t able to look directly into light.”

  Kyreol thought of the photograph she had seen of a pair of enormous, silvery eyes belonging to a vague, shadowy shape, on the verge of ducking back into darkness.

  “It’s their wall paintings I want you to study,” Joss said. “They’re like nothing you will ever have seen. Great clouds of color, abstract designs. Yet even colors have significance and, sometimes, a reference to future events that might disturb them—such as volcanic activity or strangers coming.”

  “Do they like strangers?”

  “They seem to. There are never more than two or three of us at one time, and we space our visits. They’ve learned our names; sometimes they give us small gifts. Generally, they go about their daily business undisturbed by us.”

  Kyreol chewed a bite of stew. Visions of the journey through the dark of space, her world growing tinier and tinier until it merged into the glittering mist of stars, of her first, irrevocable step onto an alien world, made the bite stick in her throat. Her hands felt cold. She frowned, trying to mask her fear from Joss. If she was to be an interplanetary agent, this would be only the first of many journeys.

  But he saw her fear, and asked anxiously, “Are we asking too much of you, Kyreol of the Riverworld? You have many gifts I want to test in other cultures. But only if you want that. You don’t have to go to Xtal. You never have to leave Thanos, if you choose not to.”

  But that made her feel restless, as though there was not room enough on one world for her. She laughed at herself, then said slowly, “I want to go to Xtal. As long as there’s a place with a name that I haven’t been to, I’ll be curious about it. It scares me to think of stepping off this world. What if I can’t get back on? But I still want to go. I want to see the cave paintings. I want to see how the Burrowers draw their tomorrows.”

  They talked of practical matters then: of what she should pack, how long the flight would take, what time they would leave. When Joss Tappen left, it was very late. The Dome was hushed. It seemed at that moment to Kyreol a tiny planet in itself, the people within it different from those who lived on the ancient, living earth below. If I step even farther, she thought, will I change even more? Will Terje know me when I get back? The thought made her throat bum. I should have gone with Terje. She turned restlessly, pacing a little, not realizing she had spoken the words aloud. She
found Nara watching her, seated on the cushions, her eyes grave, her dark face very still.

  “You sense it, too,” she said abruptly, and Kyreol, startled, stopped mid-pace. Relief ran through her, that her feelings had a name, even though the name was trouble.

  “I’m uneasy,” she said. “I don’t know why. What is it?”

  “I don’t know either,” Nara said helplessly. “I’m not a Healer, or a Healer’s daughter. Foresight is not my gift. I just feel—” She stood up and went to Kyreol, took Kyreol’s hands between her own, smiling, though the worry still filled her eyes. “I just keep wanting to protect you all from something—you, Terje, Regny, Joss—but I have no idea what it is. And there’s nothing I can do. Except wait until you are safely beside me again.” She touched Kyreol’s cheek, her smile deepening, and Kyreol felt soothed. “We’ve been on long journeys, you and I. Stepping out of the known world has its price. But the rewards are incalculable.”

  ★

  FOUR DAYS LATER, Kyreol watched an enormous freighter, all dark planes and cities of winking lights, crawling through the void slowly as a caterpillar compared to their swift hawk-flight. They caught up with it, passed over it; it blurred into shapeless streaks of light. It was, she thought, the most exciting thing that had happened in hours.

  As they left Thanos she had watched her world and her moon grow small enough to hold in her arms—smoothly, brightly beautiful, one gold-blue, one ice-white, like bubbles, adrift in a vast dark. The sun burned like a torch in the night, casting shadows that spanned thousands of miles. The distance between one bubble of fire or rock or water and another seemed overwhelming. That the distance had been breached, the empty silence, so different from the private silence of dreams, had been broken at all was astonishing.

  “Five hundred years ago,” Joss Tappan had told her, “it would have taken us months to get to Xtal.

  Now the Dome has a routine flight across the system; the entire flight takes less than two weeks. We learned a great deal when we began comparing our technology with that of alien cultures.”

  The River here was black, deep; the shores were of white fire, too far even to consider. The stepping stones were isolated worlds. Even at the speed with which their small ship streaked through space, there were hours on end when Kyreol saw little besides swarms of dust and ice particles gleaming momentarily, like fireflies, in its light. Even that fascinated her: the desert of time and distance between one handful of dust and the next.

  I love it, she thought, all her worries dissipated. She felt insignificant as a fly, yet proud that she was part of the thinking beings who had told themselves a story of traveling through space, and then found the way to make the story true. The path through the dark was old and familiar; countless people had gone ahead of her to make it safe. Remembering them, she forgot her fear, and all her odd sense that despite the serenity of the flight, there might indeed be something to fear.

  It was while they were passing the planet between Thanos and Xtal—the giant water bubble called Niade with its eighteen moons—that trouble came out of nowhere. It was as if a hand out of the dark struck them with a terrifying force, sent them spinning toward those moons, toward that looming water, toward the bottomless deep beyond.

  3

  THE HUNTERS stood still within the shadows flowing from the moonlit trees. Behind them, the water pouring down the Face thundered its constant, powerful chant, then gradually grew deep, slow, near the place where the hunters hid. They were watching a cluster of small, bobbing boats anchored in the River, illumined by moonlight and by the fire of torches held aloft. The reflections of fire streaked across the dark water toward the Healer’s house.

  A chant began, low, indistinct. Terje’s hair twitched slightly in a puzzled shake. “What is it?” he whispered. His words had little more sound than a night-moth’s wings under the chanting and the distant roar of the Falls. Regny drew breath softly, easing his stance one muscle at a time.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it… I don’t recognize the chant.”

  “It’s something to do with the River. They keep asking it something—” He made another abrupt, tiny movement. “We have to get closer.” Regny’s hand closed above his elbow, and he stilled.

  There was a faint crackling of leaves, no more sound than a beetle might make, foraging. Terje looked out of the comer of his eyes. A hunter passed them, not stalking, but walking in his normal way, his bare feet automatically adjusting his weight to pass noiselessly across whatever twig or dry leaf happened to be underfoot. They watched him move toward the Healer’s house and stop, merge into the silence of the trees around him.

  Terje whispered, “He’s watching, too.”

  “There will be others. Stay still.”

  “But what is it?”

  “You’re asking me? You were born here.”

  “You should know,” Terje said reasonably. They listened. A few more boats, poled upriver, were joining the cluster. The chant seemed no more than a murmur, rising and falling rhythmically, like breathing. Another hunter appeared briefly in the moonlight, slipped into the shadows around the Healer’s house. Something in their secrecy made Terje think not of rituals but of wild things drawn toward warmth, or toward something unfamiliar. Or toward—

  “You should know,” he said again. The pitch of his voice made one hunter turn his head, scan the night.

  Regny had gathered breath, but he held it until the hunter turned away again. Then he breathed, “Calm down. Or else go wait downriver.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be.”

  “Regny, what is it? The whole Riverworld is watching the Healer’s house. It’s night, they’re chanting to the River, there’s no feasting, no Moon-Flash, so it can’t be a betrothal; they seem to be waiting—they seem…” His voice faded uncertainly. Regny answered after a moment, his face holding no more expression than a stone.

  “I’ve never seen it before. But the darkness, the fire, the chant to the River—they’re reminiscent of the mid-year ritual.”

  Terje glanced at him quickly, involuntarily. “The naming of the dead. But this isn’t a death ritual. The Healer gives the dead back to the River.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe he’s doing some kind of special Healing. That must be it.” He brooded, his eyes on the stone house, its round windows rippling with fire. “Regny, we have to get closer.”

  “The house is surrounded by hunters. You’d be recognized.”

  “There are other fair-skinned hunters. I wouldn’t be that conspicuous.”

  “You would be with your head through the window.”

  Terje was silent, frowning. Another hunter passed them, an older man, with grizzled hair and black feather armbands. Seeing two men dimly in the moonlight, he gave them a hunter’s greeting, showing his palm with his sign on it, then went on, silent as an owl in the night. Regny loosed his breath slowly.

  “It’s getting crowded around here. We should separate.”

  “Listen.”

  The chant had stopped. A night breeze stirred through the trees, left a moonlit hush in its wake. The moon had grown distant, shriveled. A petal of fire dropped from one boat into the water. Then another. The boats, their bows lamplit, were turning downriver. The hunters watched silently for a long time until the last golden star of light had glimmered away into the darkness. Then Terje whispered, “Now. Now we can see.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “No.”

  Terje opened his mouth, closed it. He said patiently, “If you weren’t with me, that’s the decision I would make.”

  Regny’s impassive face relaxed a little. “I know. You should be here alone, and I shouldn’t be telling you what to do. But you’re not, and I am. The Healer is an extraordinary man. You know that. One glimpse of your face and he’d be asking so many questions we’d both be out of a job. Bear with me. We’re both here, and it’s safer for me to go. All right?�
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  Terje sighed, an inaudible fall of breath. “Regny. I’m going.”

  “All right,” Regny whispered. “All right. Just wait here for me; I’ll see if the hunters are still around. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  He stood motionless, trying to hear Regny’s movements through the forest, unsurprised when he couldn’t. His thoughts turned to Kyreol. He resisted an impulse to look at the sky to see if an interplanetary vessel might by chance be passing overhead. Xtal. He tried to remember what he had learned about it. Second planet from the sun, smallest in the system, full of volcanic dust and sulphur, and some of the most advanced underground cities in the system. Most of what he remembered, she had told him, her face alight with wonder and curiosity. Much of the time when she talked of other worlds, he didn’t listen. He watched her face, its constantly varying expressions making him smile. Now he wished he had listened. But even as he concentrated on Xtal, her face drifted among the stars where the planet should have been, and he felt himself smiling again, thinking of all the things she would have to tell him after her long journey. Then two hunters making their way home after their vigil passed him, and he made his mind as quiet as his body. They didn’t notice him; they spoke softly, briefly to one another.

  “Who will become the new Healer?”

  “No one knows.”

  “The Healer will know before he dies.”

  “The River will give him a dream.”

  “The River dreams the World.”

  They faded away into the night. Terje swallowed, his body suddenly stiff and heavy as a tree trunk, a numbness seeping into his face. For a moment he thought he couldn’t move. Then he was moving, very quickly but noiselessly, trying to breathe around the weight in his chest. If there were other hunters, he didn’t see them. His mind was focused on the frail, wavering flame within the dark house. He reached it finally, sweating and beginning to tremble, though he hadn’t run far. He hugged the stones, eased his face into one of the open windows.