Moon-Flash (24 page)

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 blueblack, 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.”

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 forest, 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 anymore. 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 stern 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 skirt 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.