Moon-Flash (29 page)

Whose ship, Kyreol wondered, was it? A Dome ship? One of the alien’s? Or a ship full of shadows, drawn toward the beacon coming out of the dead city?

I don’t care,
she thought.
I don’t care. I just want to go home.

Joss. She couldn’t go home without Joss. Or the dead within the Dome ship.

“I bet it’s close,” she said suddenly. The alien, making noises, didn’t seem to hear. “If they saw our light, they must have landed as close as possible . . . I bet we could see it if we could just look out the right window. If we could find a window.”

Her eyes strayed over the dock.

Or climb on the roof.

The bubble-people didn’t seem to care for ladders. And the dock itself, shielded against the dust, looked only upward.

How,
she wondered, while the alien was busy with its mysterious computations,
can I get on the roof?

If she could fly the shuttle . . . But even if she could—an extremely remote possibility—she’d have to rise near the message light. And there was no telling what kind of damage that might do if she wasn’t careful.

Besides, it would upset the alien, and she owed it too much to upset it now.

She sighed, feeling useless. The alien made a garbled noise. Hope? Frustration? Success? She had a
sudden vision of its planet, full of beings all muttering a constant, complex string of peculiar sounds as they went about their daily business. How did they ever sort out all the sounds? Did they say simple things with their beaks, like “Good morning?” Or did they just blat at one another, like mud-holes conversing?

“Kyreol.”

Her skin prickled with shock.

“Kyreol.”

A voice from the console.

The alien backed away from it with a whistle of surprise. Kyreol sprang toward it.

“I’m here!” she cried. “I’m here! It’s me, Kyreol. Me.” She pointed at herself. “Kyreol.”

The alien gave another whistle. Then it matched sounds out of its vast, unpredictable repertoire.

“Kyreol,” it said hollowly. Its hands shifted across the panel, hovered, then touched a light.

“Kyreol.”

“I’m here,” she said to the light. She leaned over it, weak with relief. “I’m here . . .”

“Are you all right? This is Wayfarer, from the Dome. We’ve been searching for you. Are you all right? Where are you?”

“I’m in the city. Can you see it?”

“Affirmative. We landed almost on top of it.”

“Can you see the green light?”

“Yes! It led us here. How—Did you do that?”

“No.” She shook her head, half-laughing, half-crying. “No. There’s someone with me. Do you want us to come out? What side of the city are you on?”

“We’re carrying a small shuttle. Is there room to land through the roof?”

“It’s a dock. An empty dock. But the light—”

“We can edge past it. It would be easier to pick you up than for us to try and find each other on foot. Are you hurt at all?”

“No.” The laughter in her died suddenly. “No. But—the ship crashed. I’m alive. Joss Tappan—He—I don’t know what happened to him. I couldn’t find him anywhere. The others are dead.” She added, at the silence. “I covered them against the dust. We have to bring them home.”

“Yes. Don’t worry. We’ll be with you in a few moments.”

“Don’t scare the alien. It’s very shy.”

The voice from Wayfarer rose. “Kyreol! There are no aliens on this moon!”

“There are now. Please,” she said anxiously, “hurry.”

She look at the alien, missed it, then looked down. It was sitting on the floor under the panel, its eyes pale pink, as nervous as Kyreol would be, anticipating a ship full of its kind. Kyreol gazed at it a moment, uncertainly. Then she sat down beside it, close to the soft fur, the sleeping young, the faint, charcoal smell of its fear. Together they waited for rescue.

The small shuttle eased past the signal light and landed in a whirl of dust. The hatch opened. Kyreol shifted, wanting to run to it. All the alien’s eyes were closed; in terror or against the dust, she couldn’t tell. Its big shoulders heaved and fell in a breath. One eye
opened. It looked at her palely. Then, very slowly, it got up, tugging at her until she rose.

“Kyreol,” it said, and pointed to the shuttle crew, in flightsuits and helmets, leaping to the floor.

She ran.

They tried to hug her, take their helmets off and talk all at the same time. She knew them: Miko Ko, a woman from the Interplanetary Agency, one of Joss Tappan’s coworkers, and a young, light-eyed man, Cay Tappan, Joss Tappan’s nephew, one of the Inter-systems pilots.

“Nara will be glad to see you,” Miko Ko said huskily, stroking Kyreol’s dusty hair. Cay Tappan was staring across the room at seven feet of fur.

“Who is that?”

“Don’t scare it,” Kyreol pleaded.

“It’s scaring me. I’ve been all over this system and I’ve never seen anything—anyone like that.” He took in the flashing lights and lit screens behind the alien. “You got all this working? This place has been dead for fifty years.”

“The alien did. It saved us. I didn’t do anything; it did everything. I think it crashed at the same time we did. It’s from another star system.”

Cay Tappan whistled. The alien, rocking a little on its feet, opened one eye at the sound.

“It likes soft noises,” Kyreol said. “It has three eyes. It’s scared now, but at least it opened one. It has babies.”

“What?”

“On its shoulders. They’re very tiny. They sing.” She paused, feeling as if she were telling one of her
childhood stories. Miko Ko’s mouth was open. “If you sing to it, it likes that.”

“Well,” Miko said in a rush of breath, with all the Agency’s readiness for good-will among neighbors. “Whatever it likes.”

She hummed a few tones. The alien’s other eyes opened.

They sang to each other for a while. Soon, they were standing together at the console panel, pointing, gesturing, inventing a language as they went along, of stray noises and body movements. The alien showed them, with its star map, where it had come from. Then it activated the scanning screen again, and they watched silently the monotonous patterns of storm and darkness around them.

“Joss is out there somewhere . . .”

“How do you know?” Cay asked gently.

“He wasn’t on the ship. I looked everywhere. He wasn’t there.” She paused. “Also—there’s someone else out there. A sort of bulky, faceless, shadowy people, walking in the wind. They scared both of us. We saw them on the screen.”

Cay stared at her. “Are you sure?”

“We saw them.”

“It’s a small, very barren moon,” Miko objected. “Nothing lives here.”

“I’d better check it out . . .” He eyed Kyreol. “Do you want to go to the ship?”

She shook her head. “I want to come with you. I want to find Joss. But I don’t want to leave the alien alone.”

“I’ll stay with it,” Miko said. She smiled as they
stared at her. “I like it. I’m good with languages. Maybe we can find a way to talk. Or click. Or something.”

Kyreol touched the alien to get its attention. She pointed to herself and Cay, then to Wayfarer’s shuttle, and finally tapped the scanning screen a few times, until the alien, standing stock-still, made a huff of comprehension. It stroked its young, its eyes paling, then darkening as it stroked Kyreol’s hair, as if she were one more of its younglings, and clicked at her briefly.

“I’m staying,” Miko said. “Miko.”

It gave a sudden, startling imitation of Kyreol’s laughter.

*

KYREOL, strapped in the shuttle, watched the white city fall away from them as they rose. Cay Tappan was busy staying away from the light beam, but she hung over her seat, staring down, seeing the empty patterns of domes, and stairs and tiered walls with their walkways leading to the abandoned room.

“What was it?” she whispered. “Whose was it?”

“It was an experiment. The people of Niade built it—the strongest, the most courageous of them. It was to be part factory, part space station for its explorers, part laboratory. It had room for generations of families. They must have stayed for—maybe twenty years. Then, even the most ambitious of them gave it up.”

“Why?”

“To return to Niade. To return to the seas. They
were dying away from their home planet. They were like fish trying to live on a desert. Theoretically, their bodies could stand it. They thought succeeding generations would wean themselves away from the seas. But the tides were in their blood—literally. The sea pulled them back.”

“It’s not easy to leave your home.”

“You’d know that.”

“It was easier for me. But the alien . . . To be that fearful, and yet to leave its home to explore—it’s braver than anyone I’ve ever met. Except,” she added, “my mother. The alien had its ship. I had Terje. My mother just had her betrothal feathers.”

Cay smiled. He explained to Wayfarer, which stood like a very tall, very slender mushroom beside the city, what they were doing. The little shuttle picked up speed as it left the city. It skimmed across the blustery surface, heading in the general direction of the crash. So close to the ground, the billowing, feathery dust made it difficult to see. Kyreol kept blinking, trying to clear her eyes, when it was the dust beyond that was blurring her vision. In such a shifting landscape, she realized, anything might form . . . a few dark stones might turn into shadows walking against the wind.

Did we see them?
she wondered.
Didn’t we?

The ship appeared under them suddenly, a broken, silvery husk half-covered already with dust. Cay made a soft sound. He landed close to it.

“Stay here,” he said briefly, and Kyreol nodded gratefully.

He was gone a long time. Panic overtook her,
building slowly out of the loneliness, the constant whip and chatter of dust, no horizon to see, no sky—and the ship itself, gashed and twisted metal, the dead within already being slowly buried. Staring at it, she realized how close she had come to death.

She put her hands over her mouth, reliving the terror, grieving once again. Cay, opening the hatch, made her jump.

“Don’t cry.” His own eyes were red-rimmed in his dusty face. He put his arms around her. “Kyreol, I don’t know how you survived that. And then to find shelter for yourself, to find help from the most unlikely looking source—You’ve done well.”

“Joss?” she asked, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. He started the shuttle again.

“You were right. I couldn’t find a trace of him. We’ll come back for the dead later.”

They found the encroaching line of twilight and skimmed through it. Cay spoke again to Wayfarer, giving them the coordinates of the crashed ship. Then he spoke to Miko; she had seen nothing new on the screens. Kyreol stared out at the distant night. The storm abated after an hour or so; the dust began to settle. The storm had concealed nothing. The surface was powdery as far as the eye could see. Not a rock on it, black or white. Nothing even to cast a shadow. Cay angled out of the twilight, sped across the sunlight again.

Shadows.

She straightened in her seat. They were long, lean, stroked across the surface by the setting sun. Four of them. Shadows far out of proportion to the figures
who cast them, moving slowly across the fading daylight, still hunched against the dust as though, after fighting it for hours, they hadn’t realized the storm was over.

She made a sound. Cay turned his head quickly. Big, darkly fluttering, faceless . . . One of the shadows divided, separating into itself and a smaller fifth shadow, which, feeling the still air, lifted a dark cover and revealed a face to the setting sun.

“Joss!”

NARA RETURNED to the Riverworld with the sun. Regny had made yet another journey to the Outstation to meet her as she landed and to escort her through the forests. Terje stayed in the house with the Healer’s body. It shouldn’t be left alone, he felt; that was a mark of respect. He felt also, dimly, that if he stayed close to it, perhaps something of the thoughts and dreams that had filled the house might wander into his head and help him make sense of the Healer’s wishes. But his thoughts remained familiar: he was just Terje, even-tempered and full of good will, but with no more foresight than a bird.