by Tod Davies
Lily followed. The older woman was like a magnet for her. “It’s as if a part of me and a part of her belong together,” Lily thought. When she thought this, she also thought, “For now. Not for always.”
But why?
She didn’t know.
“Look up,” Livia said in a clear voice. “Don’t look back. Look ahead.” When Lily did, she saw the sky.
It was a pale, sickly blue, even in the night, from the force of the lights of Megalopolis. Lily could see only two stars; she couldn’t tell which these were. In Arcadia you could place a star by its fellows. That was the way she had learned. “I have no way of understanding this sky,” she thought sadly. The sadness mixed with thoughts of the boy sleeping heavily in the room below. “He has no way of understanding me,” she thought. “And I have none of understanding him.”
And yet her feelings were far from despair. She should feel hate, she thought. She should wish for revenge. “But I don’t; no, I don’t.” And Lily thought again of the sleeping head, gilded by the candlelight, and she smiled.
NOW LILY COULD SEE THERE WERE TWO MOONS IN THE SKY
“Look up again,” Livia said, impatient. They were almost at the top of the tower.
Lily looked up and saw the moon. It was large and pallid and watery in the sky, and its face was a curious blank—not the mysteriously smiling face she was used to looking up at when she slipped out of her room to meet a friend on a warm Arcadian spring night. Pondering this, she stepped after Livia onto the roof of the tower—a narrow circle, surrounded by an iron rail. Rex appeared silently at her feet and pressed up against her in the shadows.
She looked again at the moon and she said, “It looks wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Livia said sharply.
“It doesn’t look like the moon,” Lily said.
There was a moment’s quiet. “You should be afraid of me,” Livia said softly. “But you’re not. Why is that?”
“I don’t know why,” Lily said. It was the honest truth.
“I know why,” Livia said, in her same soft way. Her eyes shone, in the fitful moonlight, like a lizard’s. Or a snake’s. “We have met before, you know.”
“Have we?” Lily said uneasily. For a moment, a picture came to her, so vividly that it blotted out the scene before her then. And that picture was of a desert, vast and golden and impassable. A beautiful young man stood before her, his eyes the same color as Livia’s. He was smiling at her and holding out his hand. Somehow Lily knew, with a rush of horror, that behind him, all around him, under the sands that stretched out so pure and smooth, were the mangled corpses of the innocent—of her friends. “But I have never been in a place like that before,” Lily thought. “I have never had such friends. I have never lived anywhere but Arcadia.”
Rex growled low in his throat.
Livia looked down at him. “Oh yes,” she said contemptuously. “We’ve met, too, you and I. Don’t think I forget. And if I could have my way, I would call my servants and have you thrown off this tower.”
Lily dropped instinctively to her feet and put her arms around Rex. He never moved. He never took his intelligent brown eyes from Livia’s face.
“Oh don’t worry,” Livia said irritably. But she laughed. “I won’t hurt your little dog. There’s nothing much he can do to me—not this time.” She looked at Lily. “Oh, stand up, for goodness’ sake, stand up. I have things to tell you. And there isn’t very much time.”
BOOM. As Lily slowly stood, she heard it. And she saw the rocket trail from the south as the missile exploded into the sky.
BOOM. There went another, to the east. And BOOM. To the west. And then BOOM. BOOM. There were two trails, rising up from the Donatees to the north. From the direction of the Children’s Mine. From the direction of Arcadia.
“They are going to the moon,” Lily said. The thought filled her with a kind of awe. Not at the thought of man and woman conquering space, not in wonder at the ingenuity of humankind. No. Lily, a child of Arcadia, was filled with astonishment at the idea that anyone who could know Arcadia-—Arcadia the beautiful, Arcadia the fragrant, Arcadia the warm—that anyone in a world that held Arcadia, or even the possibility of Arcadia, would want to hurtle themselves toward a gray rock in the empty vastness of space. That idea was a frightening one to Lily.
And yet it was an exciting one, too. She thought again of Conor, who had pretended to conquer her in being conquered himself. She thought of the huge, imperial power of his city, and she felt, for a moment, even more helpless than she actually was—even more small.
Still, inside of the smallness was that flicker of excitement. She frowned as she noticed it. It might not be healthy. It might not be good. But it was there. And she could see that if anything fanned it, it would grow into a monstrous flame.
It made her feel warm all over. She slipped off her cloak and gulped thankfully at the cold night air.
“Yes,” Livia hissed softly. “Exactly.”
Lily looked at her, startled.
“Look at the moon again, Lily,” Livia said. “And tell me what you see.”
Lily, obedient, looked at the flat dirty disk that hung there, disconsolate, in the sky. “They’re going there, aren’t they?” she said. “Those rockets. You’re sending people to the moon. That’s what they say in Arcadia.”
“They’re going there, yes,” Livia said, pointing to the poor, ugly, yellow thing. “But they’re not going to the moon.”
Lily, silent, waited for her to explain.
“Look harder, Lily,” Livia said. “Look as hard as you can and tell me what you see.”
Lily looked. She could feel Livia willing her to look. She could feel Rex willing her to look. She could feel their wills strengthen her sight.
She looked.
“Why, there it is,” she said, almost to herself. “Why couldn’t I see it before? Why can’t everyone see it?”
It was the Moon Itself.
There it was, a shadowed but still beautiful sphere hanging in the sky, to the right and a little above the flat round thing below.
That ugly yellow disk was a False Moon.
Lily could see that clearly now. There were two moons in the sky.
“How?” she said simply. “Why?” And then she said, “And why can no one see it the way we see it now?”
Livia gave a sour smile. “The last question is the easiest. We see what we expect to see and what we’re told to see. That is the secret the powerful of all worlds know.
“As to how, that’s easy, too. Our technology is great. Well, it should be, considering what we’ve had to pay for it.” She looked around her tower at the gray, wire-riddled, garbage-strewn city below. “It was easy enough for us to build another moon. Haven’t you heard, in your little Arcadia?” she said in a haughty voice. “We have become like gods, here in Megalopolis. We do what we will. And we do it because we can.”
“Yes,” Lily said slowly. “I have heard that. Though we didn’t think of you in Arcadia, not as much as all that.”
Livia seemed annoyed by this answer, and Lily had a moment’s thought that she perhaps should not have been so rude. This thought confused her, and for a moment when she looked into the sky, all she could see was the False Moon.
But if she looked hard and straight, after a moment the confusion cleared.
There was the Moon Itself again, as beautiful and friendly as she remembered it. Only it was shadowed by the Lie.
“As for the ‘why,’” Livia went on, “that is a slightly longer answer.”
“They say in Arcadia,” Lily said, “that when Megalopolis has ruined the world, it will have to go to the moon.”
“Ruined the world!” Livia gave a snort. “You can’t ‘ruin’ a resource, you can either use it up or maintain it. If we’ve chosen to use it up for the greater good of all mankind, I hardly think that can be described as ‘ruining’ it!” She gave Lily a look of displeasure. “But of course you’re only a little provincial, and a girl at that, and you can�
��t have been very well educated. You can’t understand that we are at the end of history, that what brought us here was a secret plan to grow and grow and grow until we expanded to fit the universe! We’ve done that. And now it’s time to go into the sky.”
“To the False Moon,” Lily murmured. She shivered. It was so cold out here on the tower with Livia, suddenly much colder than before. From every direction came noise and the kind of lights that made her head hurt. And all the smells were bad.
“Not at first,” Livia said reflectively. “At first, we went to the Moon Itself—but we told no one. Only the Council of Four and a handful of representatives of the Highest Families. And that was when we found them. They had been waiting for us, of course.”
“Who?” Lily said.
“Angels,” Livia said.
At this Lily laughed out loud. She gave a hearty and sparkling laugh, and she reached down to give Rex a pat.
In her exhilaration, she knew that she laughed not because she didn’t believe Livia, but because she did. She laughed not because she thought Livia was joking, but because she knew she wasn’t.
It was a laugh of triumph, though Lily would have been hard pressed to explain what the triumph was about. But somehow, she knew it was the triumph of the Moon Itself. “The Moon Itself is still my friend,” she thought, and she laughed again to Livia’s discomfort. “They haven’t destroyed the Moon.” And maybe this meant, too, that the Megalopolitans would not be able to destroy the Mountains either. No matter how hard they tried.
“They were there waiting for us, as I’ve said,” Livia went on, trying to hide her annoyance. “They had flown there to wait. They wanted to treat with us—to negotiate. Well, of course, we turned them down. We’ve had no use for angels on this planet for thousands of years. We weren’t about to start treating with them now.”
At this, another strange picture floated through Lily’s head. She could see the world from above. She was held in a pair of strong arms. The wind whistled past her face as she swooped down over the sea. And she could hear the flapping of wings.
Then it was gone.
Livia looked at her sourly and went on.
“Instead we built another Moon. The situation was increasingly critical down here—something had to be done. Surplus population rioting, water poisoned, air too harsh to breathe—something had to be done. We built another Moon,” she said reflectively. “And by and large it has worked rather well.”
“But you couldn’t ignore the Moon Itself,” Lily said, and in her heart she exulted. She could feel Rex happy under her hand. But why? What caused this happiness to rush through her? It was an even greater happiness than she had felt earlier, in Conor Barr’s arms, though it was of a simpler kind.
“No,” Livia said reluctantly. “Not if we mean to move on. We can’t ignore the Moon Itself. It will not let us pass. The angels will not let us pass. We thought, over the years, they’d become bored and move to another place. But they have stayed, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Lily whispered.
Livia looked away and up at the False Moon. Her mouth pursed into a tight little ‘o’.
“Apparently,” she finally said, “they are waiting for you.”
Lily looked down at where Rex had lain, only to find he had slipped away during this conversation down the spiral stairs.
The candle sputtered on the table by the dying fire. Rex paced back and forth on the hearthrug, pausing from time to time to look at the alternately yearning and cruel face of the sleeping boy. What he saw in that boy’s face obviously troubled the dog and set him to pacing anew.
In the bed, Conor stirred, holding his arms out to a person who was no longer there. But as his eyes opened, so did the door, and Lily slipped inside. She exchanged a look with Rex. His look warned her against too much excitement, but he could see that she was too far from home and from all she knew to be able to take that kind of advice. Instead, her eyes dancing, she lifted her eyebrows up high on her head. And she grinned.
Rex didn’t like that grin. But there was nothing he could do. He lay down with a heavy thud and a sigh.
Lily let her cloak drop, stepped out of her dress, and shivered, hurrying to slide into the warm sheets beside Conor, who, without speaking, gave himself up to her again.
“Where were you?” he said sleepily in the dark, after the candle had died and gone out. “Where did you go?”
There was a moment’s silence from Lily’s side, as if she were carefully choosing the words she would say. “I was with your mother,” she said softly.
“My mother,” he said cautiously. “That was courteous of her—to greet you like that.”
“More than that,” Lily murmured in the dark. “As she was showing me the Villa—it’s very beautiful, Conor, much grander than anything I have ever seen in Arcadia—she told me about her…your father’s…plan.”
Conor was silent. It was as if he could hear the false note in her voice. “She was never false,” he told me later sadly. “But that night…I think my mother had a spell on her.” I know differently, of course. It doesn’t take a witch’s spell to seduce a young girl with visions of power, after all. Alas, that I should know that.
“A diplomatic mission, Conor,” Lily said. And for a moment, he could almost think it was Livia, speaking there in the dark. The thought made him shudder. But Lily pressed her warm body up against his, and the thought went away as quickly as it had come. “They want you to represent the Council of Four. A great honor, as I understand it, among your people. And I’m to be at your side.”
“A mission,” Conor said.
“To the Moon Itself,” Lily said happily. “We leave tomorrow.”
“The Moon Itself,” Conor repeated slowly to himself. He thought: “Who is this girl I have brought to my home?” And the answer came immediately from the region of his heart. “This girl is your Fate,” it said.
“Yes,” Lily said. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Moon.”
This was the first and last lie that Lily had ever told in her entire life. Hearing it, Rex gave a low, helpless growl.
“Yes,” Conor said, enthusiastic now. He took Lily in his arms again. And the lovers murmured endearments until dawn. While Lily’s had a certain truth to them, her voice now had a sweet false edge that made her dog restless where he lay.
Conor and Lily slept. But Rex, instead, spent the hour till dawn staring at the smoldering red ash of the dying fire in a foreign hearth.
Fourteen
“I often think about that night up on the tower,” Lily said much later to Death. They were walking—trudging, almost—together up a wide, steep path that went first straight ahead, then wound so snakelike that Lily couldn’t see what was at the end. “I often wonder what would have happened if I had shouted, or pushed Livia off, or if I had said no to all of her plans. I often wonder that.” Lily bit her lip and thought. Rex walked, as ever, by her side.
Death smiled and continued her walk upward. But she didn’t say a word. Not just then. And it was obvious to Lily why not.
“But I did none of those things,” she said ruefully, “I yearned—that’s right, yearned—to know what would happen next. And I said yes. Oh, I said yes. There is no changing that. But what if it was meant to be all along?”
Thinking hard over this question, Lily, too, fell silent. And she and Death continued their companionable walk.
How do I know all this? You’ll be wondering who told me what they said to each other on that road. Well, of course it was Death. Death herself told me all this, and more, when I met her myself on the Road of the Dead. And then, what I didn’t know from her, I know from the Key. These are the important parts of the story, I think. But not, to me, necessarily the most moving, the most touching. Those parts have always come from the loved ones in my life. Curiously enough, even from my grandmother Livia, who saw, quite rightly, a lot of herself in me. “You’re tall, like me, hmm. And you have my hair, even if your skin is that dirty brow
n,” she said when we finally met as grandmother and grandchild, many years later. “And you have my energy, which is something I’m not sure I wanted to give you.”
This amused me, I remember. “No, Grandmother,” I said. “I’m quite sure you didn’t.”
“Your father never had it—my energy,” she said in that grim voice that was such a feature of her last years. “He was, at bottom, a very conventional boy.”
About that, I think she was wrong. But she was correct in thinking he wasn’t much her son. For my grandmother, though she knew the world with frightening clarity (and it’s a clarity I am sometimes frightened to own myself), was unable to love. And my father, who never, even in his seasoned old age, could see exactly what was in front of him—he knew how to love. And he did love my mother. I do know that. Strange to say, it’s a great comfort to me, even now, in my sixtieth year.
“It’s been a dream of mine for a long time: going to the Moon.” Conor said this from where he stood behind the crystal window of their temporary quarters, another beautifully decorated room, hung with green silk held up by brocade roses. Outside the window was a view that only the rich could afford, and that only they were allowed—of the Moon Itself. Lily lay behind him, on the bed, in shadows.
“Mmm,” she said, noncommittally. “Doesn’t he know?” her eyes asked Rex. “Doesn’t Conor know that this is the False Moon? He’s looking right at the Moon Itself, doesn’t he see?” But Rex’s eyes told her nothing. They had told her nothing since the night she stood with Livia at the top of the tower. Since that night, when she looked at Rex, all she saw was a dog. He was no longer a guide. He was just a dog.
Lily hadn’t bothered being excited when she, Julian, Livia and Conor had filed solemnly onto the shiny, brand new Megalopolitan rocket ship, the one guaranteed to take its occupants to the Moon in under three hours (“Wake up at Home, Eat Lunch on the Moon,” as the advertisement went). She had known without being told that they would first go to the False Moon, where all the reporters and laborers, and the holidaymakers who could afford the novelty of a trip to the moon, would see them land and, reassured, go on with life as normal.
