Moon-Flash (31 page)

A FACE CAME into Kyreol’s mind. It came out of nowhere, a dream-moment out of the milky, blinding swirl of dust the shuttle disturbed landing. It was painted dead-white, with Riverworld signs on its brow, its cheeks. Its hair was sun-colored; its eyes were dusty-gold. It said,
Kyreol.

A death mask.

A shudder ran through her, as if all her bones had recognized the mask. Then, abruptly, she was crying, wailing, while Cay, trying to land, stared at her in astonishment.

“Kyreol!”

“I don’t know which one of them died! The dreams are so mixed up!” She fumbled for the hatch handle, sobbing.

“Wait—”

“Something’s happened in the Riverworld!” The hatch opened finally, just as the shuttle settled; the dust matted her tear-streaked face, and she choked.
The smaller of the dark figures dropped the billowing plastic it had worn as a shield against the wind.

“Kyreol!”

She stumbled out of the shuttle into Joss Tappan’s arms.

“It’s all right,” he said soothingly, shaken. “It’s all right—”

She heard a familiar clicking. She turned her head and saw, as the other figures dropped their dark, voluminous shields, four tall aliens with variegated fur and rapidly paling eyes.

The sight made her stop crying for a moment. “Joss,” she breathed, “they’re—”

“They’re very friendly,” he said quickly.

“I know.”

“What do you mean you know?”

“I know,” she said again. “I’ve been with one. In the dead city. Wayfarer saw the signal—”

“Wayfarer.” He straightened then and watched the man emerging from the dust cloud. “Cay!”

Kyreol drew back to look at him. His face was very pale; a purplish, jagged cut down his cheek and jaw was just beginning to close. He smiled as she stared at him anxiously, then said, “I’m all right. I couldn’t find you on the ship. I left it to look for you. Kyreol, I can’t believe you’re alive.”

“I was trapped between two airbeds—they broke loose and saved me.”

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. Then, her face crumpling again, she nodded. “Joss—” She pushed her face
against him, hearing a chatter of curious sounds around her. “Someone died in the Riverworld. Either Terje or my father. They keep sending me messages, but I can’t—Something happened—”

“Kyreol.”

She straightened slowly, wiped her tears, and stood free of him, her face, under its mat of dust, as bizarrely masked as the face in her dream-thought. Joss held her shoulders. She saw the heaviness in his eyes, the hollows of pain in his face.

He said softly, “Please. Just try, for now, to worry about one world at a time.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“What city? We’ve been walking through dust for four days.”

“You could see it from the crashed ship. Unless the dust was too thick.”

He sighed, his hands loosening. “I wasn’t thinking after the crash. I was trying to find you. I wandered into a storm.” He looked at Cay again, his bruised face haggard with relief. “How did you find her?”

“They got a signal light going,” Cay said, “in the dead city. You remember. The one the people of Niade deserted years ago.”

“So that’s where we are,” he breathed.

“The alien did it,” Kyreol said. His attention came back to her.

“I think,” he said, “that must be who these people are looking for.”

“Yes.”

“Will they come into the shuttle?” Cay asked. He
gestured at it, watching them. They seemed less fearful than the alien Kyreol knew, and less noisy. But their eyes were still pale. She turned to them, catching their attention with the movement. She pointed toward the horizon. Then her hands stroked the air above her shoulders very gently and she hummed.

They erupted in a muddle of sounds, their eyes turning purple. Joss asked amazedly under the babble, “What in the world did you say?”

“The one I met carries tiny babies on its shoulders. It hums to them, and they hum back. Joss, it saved our lives. It’s from another star-system. It was as scared of me as I was of it. But somehow, we became friends. It figured out the computer system; I showed it where Thanos is, and it sent the signal that Wayfarer saw.”

“Miko is with it now,” Cay said. Joss was still staring at Kyreol.

“You amaze me,” he said simply. The aliens were clustering around the shuttle, making steam-whistle sounds.

“I didn’t do anything,” Kyreol said surprisedly. “The alien did it all.”

Somehow they all managed to fit in the shuttle. It sagged a little, lifting, and refused to fly very high, but in that flat world they could skim the surface without danger. Kyreol, enclosed by fur, smelling the familiar charcoal smell, turned once to search their shoulders. No younglings. One of them, with astonishing courage, touched her hair.

“Did your two ships crash?” Cay asked Joss.

“I think so, but I’m not sure. They weren’t with
their ship when I met them. Or rather when they found me lying in the dust. They gave me something to drink; they carry supplies on their kneebands. They put some kind of salve on my face. I don’t know what it was, but it felt better. I can’t believe,” he added, “that people with such a highly sophisticated technology, who can fly between systems, managed to hit our ship.”

“Maybe you hit them,” Cay suggested.

“There was no reading of another ship. It came out of nowhere. As if—as if it had somehow defied the laws of speed and time. I wish we could talk . . .” He glanced back at Kyreol, disturbed by her silence. Surrounded by four huge, beaked aliens, her face composed, she gave him a small smile. He turned, looking amazed again. Her thoughts slid away from the shuttle, away from the moon, across the river of the night to a tiny, distant world that was sending signals of its own trouble across vast distances with a stunning simplicity.

Terje, holding the River and the Moon, and the statue of death.

Her father, smiling, saying her name.

Terje, his face painted with the River and the Moon-Flash.

The signs of the Healer.

Her lips parted, moved soundlessly.
Terje, what have you done?

Night was flowing in a dark tide toward the city when they reached it. The aliens’ eye colors changed alarmingly. They emitted startled blobs of sound as
Cay, straining the overladen shuttle, managed to bring it high, then ease it down past the guide light into the dock. The shuttle hatches opened to a tangle of fur and flightsuits. At the computer, the alien with the younglings sang a deep, melodious note so loudly that parts of the shuttle vibrated and the humans ducked as if it were a wind blast, covering their ears.

Its eyes turned blue.

The aliens spent a few minutes stroking one another, their beaks clicking furiously. Cay and Joss spoke to Wayfarer, waiting patiently outside, discussing a return to the crash site to pick up valuables, the ship’s log and tapes, and the bodies of the dead. Miko was still at the computer. Kyreol went to her side, gazed down at the tiny patterns of color. “Did you figure out their alphabet?”

“I think it’s based on a number system,” Miko said absently. “One to a hundred . . . A hundred colors, color-patterns repeated with a numerical regularity.”

“When I first saw the city, I thought it was built by people who only saw white.”

Miko smiled. “It’s the moon that has no color. The people of Niade can perceive color-shades indiscernable to most humans. But they took all their possessions, all their colors with them when they went back home.”

“They died,” Kyreol said softly, “away from their home.”

“Yes.”

But Terje had never shown signs of wasting away at the Dome. He had loved both worlds: the Riverworld
and the Dome.
Or maybe,
Kyreol thought,
it was only me he loved, and I wouldn’t leave the Dome. But I would have known if he was unhappy.
She frowned down at the panel, uneasy, disturbed. What had he done, and why? Then she realized what she had been thinking. The frown turned into a knot between her brows; she swallowed hard to keep from crying again.

Icrane.

“I never went back,” she whispered drily, “to explain why I had left him.”

“Kyreol,” Joss said behind her. She turned.

“My father is dead.”

His lips parted. “How do you—” He shook his head at his questioning and pulled her to him, held her gently.

“I’m sorry.”

“We all left him, and he died without knowing why.” Her eyes were still dry, dark as the Face. “But Terje—he’s doing something I don’t understand. His face is painted like a Healer’s. Joss, when we get back—” She drew a deep breath. “When we get back, I’m going to the Riverworld.”

“Talk to your mother first. I know you’re grieved. But you can’t just—”

“I can, too.” Then some of the darkness left her eyes. She sighed. “No. You’re right. I can’t just go running in there like a child, disturbing all the hard work her Agency has done. But I will go as far as I can. I have to see Terje.” She clung to him suddenly. “I’m so afraid I’ve lost both of them.”

“No,” Joss said comfortingly. “No.” But she wasn’t comforted.

“Joss, did Wayfarer tell the Dome we’re found?”

“Yes. Their reply should come in a few minutes.”

“It’s so far,” she whispered, “between place-name and place-name.” She was silent a little, watching the aliens, listening to their noises. “Colors that are letters, sounds instead of smiles or tears . . .”

“Are you sorry you came?”

She thought. Then she drew back, looked at him. “I was afraid I’d travel so far from the Riverworld I would lose it completely from my head. But instead, it just came with me. As long as I can remember in my heart where it is in this mess of stars, I won’t be sorry.”

He smiled. “Kyreol, you’ve had a harsher introduction to other forms of highly intelligent life than any one of us ever imagined. Instead of running in fear from someone seven feet tall and covered with fur, you made a friend, you found a way to let it help you. Without that signal, Wayfarer would have searched for weeks. I’m very proud of you.”

“I’m glad,” she said. But her eyes were troubled again, full of the fragments of dark dreams.

Within the furry, chattering group, the alien with its young turned to look at her.

Its eyes paled slightly, then went slowly green. It came to her, stroked her hair and its busy, humming young, chattering, looking from Kyreol to Joss. Then, in its hollow voice, it said, “Kyreol.”

Joss started. “Miko!”

“I’m working,” Miko said, “on the clicks.”

“You’re using an alien system to translate another alien language.”

“I know,” she said cheerfully. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“You could draw pictures,” Kyreol suggested. “That’s what I did. In the dust. Or you could point.”

“Primitive,” Miko said wryly.

“We want them to come to the Dome,” Joss explained to Kyreol. “I suspect their ship is in as bad a shape as ours is. And on the Dome, we have translators. We could learn so much from them. We could provide tools to salvage their ship, perhaps. We could—”

“We could find out if it’s a man or a woman,” Kyreol said, watching the young. “Or both.”

“That, too.”

“Well,” Miko said, turning back to her work, “don’t let me stop you. Ask them.”

It took one image of Wayfarer on the screen, one drawing by Kyreol in the dust of Thanos, and half a dozen points before the aliens stopped gazing at her with their immobile faces and began conversing among themeslves.

“Thanos,” they said in their ghostly voices. “Thanos. Kyreol. Ship.”

“But how,” Kyreol asked bewilderedly, “do they say yes?”

They said yes quite simply, patting the image of Wayfarer and then their heads.

Joss laughed, delighted, and was startled again by their echoes of his laughter.

Kyreol watched them, wondering at the questions that must be going through their heads: What were these strange beings, wearing replaceable skin instead of fur, who changed their entire faces instead of their eye color, who leaked water when they were distressed and bared rows of a hard white substance in their faces at unexpected moments? Miko tossed her hands in the air and swung away from the computer, grinning. What would that mean? The gesture and the teeth. But by now, she reasoned, they must be recognizing smiles.

The panel spoke, and Miko spun back to it.

“Wayfarer.” The voice crackled, sounding very far away. “This is the Dome. We have received your message. We are immensely relieved. Please keep hourly contact with us on your voyage home. We have notified families of survivors and of the dead. Preparations will be made to receive them. The message to Nara was relayed to North Outstation Five; she will be in contact with the station from within the Riverworld. Repeat: We are delighted. Keep channels open and journey safely. End. Dome.”