Moon-Flash (19 page)

Regny stepped into the circle of his fire so quietly he startled, then looked up as Regny slipped the waterskin 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?

“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.”

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 burn.
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.