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As Alexei fought the 'majigger's controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, his more than Technopath awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae. He felt dust fronts, billowings, mixing of turbulence, an occasional vortex.
The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but his inner sense began to see through the curtain.
I must find the right vortex, he thought.
For a long time, he had sensed the storm's power diminishing, but it still shook them. He waited out another turbulence.
The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the whole ship. Alexei defied all fear to bank the 'majigger left.
Alexandra saw the maneuver on the attitude globe.
"Alexei!" she screamed.
The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the 'majigger like a chip on a geyser, spewed them up and out---a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the second moon.
Alexei looked down, saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert---moon-gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.
"We're out of it," Alexandra whispered.
Alexei turned their craft away from the dust in swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky.
"We've given them the slip," he said.
Alexandra felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, looked at the diminishing storm. Her time sense said they'd ridden within that compounding of elemental forces almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.
It was like the litany, she thought. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.
"I don't like the sound of our wing motion," Alexei said. "We suffered some damage in there."
He felt the grating, injured flight through his hands on the controls. They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of his prescient vision. Yet, they had escaped, and Alexei sensed himself trembling on the verge of a revelation.
He shivered.
The sensation was magnetic and horrifying, and he found himself caught on the question of what caused this tumbling awareness. Part of it, he felt, was the spice saturated diet of Dyuna. But he thought part of it could be the litany, as if the words had a power of their own.
"I will not fear...
Cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised on a brink of self-awareness that couldn't have been without the litany's magic.
Words from the A.O. Bible rang through his memory: "What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?"
"There's rock all around," Alexandra said.
Alexei focused on the 'majigger's launching, shook his head to clear it. He looked where his mother pointed, saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm's doing.
"You'd better set us down on sand," Alexandra said. "The wings might not take full brake."
He nodded towards a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes. "I'll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness."
She obeyed, thinking: We've got water and stillsuits. If we can find food, we can survive a long time on this desert. Szganys live here. If they can do it, so can we.
"Run for those rocks the instant we're stopped," Alexei said, "I'll take the pack."
"Run for...." She felt silent, nodded. "Wurms."
"Our comrades, the wurms," he corrected her. "They'll get this 'majigger. There'll be no evidence of where we landed."
How direct his thinking, she thought.
They glided lower---lower....
There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage---blurred shadows of dunes, rocks lifting like islands. The 'majigger touched a dune top with a soft lurch, skipped a sand valley, touched another dune.
He's killing our speed against the sand, Alexandra thought, and allowed herself to admire his competence.
"Brace yourself!" Alexei warned.
He pulled back on the wing brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. He felt them as they cupped the air, their aspect ratio dropping faster and faster. Wind screamed through the lapped coverts and primaries of the wings' leaves.
Abruptly, with only the faintest lurch of warning, the left wing, weakened by the storm, twisted upward and in, slamming across the 'majigger's side The craft skidded across a dune top, twisting to the left. It tumbled down the opposite face to bury its nose in the next dune amid a cascade of sand. They lay stopped on the broken wing side, the right wing pointing toward the stars.
Alexei jerked off his safety harness, hurled himself upward across his mother, wrenching open the door. Sand poured in around them into the cabin, bringing with it a dry smell of burnt flint. He grabbed the pack from the rear, saw that his mother was free of her harness. She stepped up onto the side of the right-hand seat and out onto the 'majigger's metal skin. Alexei followed, dragging the pack by its straps.
"Run!" he ordered.
He pointed up the dune face and beyond where they could see a rock tower undercut by sandblast winds.
Alexandra leaped off the 'majigger and ran, scrambling and sliding up the dune. She heard Alexei's panting progress behind. They came out onto a sand ridge that curved away towards the rocks.
"Follow that ridge," Alexei ordered. "It'll be faster."
They slogged towards the rocks, sand gripping their feet.
A new sound began to impress itself upon them: a muted whisper, a hissing, and abrasive slithering.
"Wurm," Alexei said.
It grew louder.
"Faster!" Alexei gasped.
The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten meters ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them.
Alexei shifted his pack to his right arm, holding it by the straps. It slapped his side as he ran. He took his mother's arm with his other hand. They scrambled onto the lifting rock, up a pebble-strewn surface through a twisted, wind-carved channel. Breath came dry and gasping in their throats.
"I can run no faster," Alexandra panted.
Alexei stopped, pressed her into a gut of rock, turned and looked down onto the desert. A mound-in-motion ran parallel to their rock island----moonlit ripples, sand waves, a cresting burrow almost level with Alexei's eyes at a distance of about one kilometer. The flattened dunes of its track curved once----a short loop crossing the patch of desert where they'd abandoned their wrecked ornitmajigger.
Where the wurm had been there was no sign of the aircraft.
The burrow mound moved outward into the desert, coursed back across his path, questing.
"It's bigger than a Guild starship," Alexei whispered. "I was told wurms grow large in the deep desert, but I didn't realize just---how big!"
"Neither did I," Alexandra breathed.
Again, the thing turned out away from the rocks, sped now with a curving track towards the horizon. They listened until the sound of its passage was lost in gentle sand stirrings all around them.
Alexei took a deep breath, looked up at the moonlit escarpment, and quoted from the Kesob or-Ibor: "Travel by night and rest in black shade through the day." He looked at his mother. "We still have a few hours of night. Can you continue?"
"One moment, if you please."
Alexei stepped out onto the rock shingle, shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps. He stood a moment with a paracompass in his hands.
"Anytime you're ready," he said.
She pushed herself away from the rock, feeling her strength return. "Which way?"
"Where this ridge leads." He pointed.
"Deep into the desert," she said.
"The Szgany desert," Alexei whispered.
And he paused, shaken by the remembering of high relief imagery, of a prescient vision he had experienced on Eser. He'd seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had vanished into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the true scene. The vision seemed to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless.
Ukrainia was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now Ukrainia is dead.
"Do you see a way to go?" Alexandra asked, mistaking his hesitation.
"No," he said. "But we'll go anyway."
He settled his shoulders more firmly in the pack, struck out up a sand-carved channel in the rock. The channel opened onto a moonlit floor of rock with benched ledges, climbing away to the south.
Alexei headed for the first ledge, clambered onto it. Alexandra followed.
She noted presently how their passage became a matter of the immediate and peculiar---the sand pockets between rocks where their steps were slowed, the wind-carved ridge that cut their hands, the obstructions that forced a choice; Go over or go around? The terrain enforced its own rhythms, speaking only when needed and then with the hoarse voices of their exertion.
"Careful here---this ledge is slippery with sand."
"Watch you don't hit your head against this overhang."
"Stay below this ridge; the moon is at our backs and it'd show our movement to anyone out there."
Alexei stopped in a bight of rock, leaned the pack against the narrow ledge.
Alexandra leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Alexei pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Eser---a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it hadn't been noticed for itself---only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it.
To stop, she thought. To rest---to truly rest.
It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if just for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.
Alexei pushed away from the rock ledge, turned, and climbed over a sloping surface. Alexandra followed with a sigh.
They slid down onto a wide shelf that led around a sheer rock face. Again, they fell into the disjointed rhythm of movement across this broken land.
Alexandra felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their hands and feet----boulders or pea-gravel or flaked rock or pea-sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.
The powder clogged nose filters and had to be blown out. Pea-sand and pea-gravel rolled on a hard surface and could spill the unwary. Rock flakes cut.
And the omnipresent sand patches dragged against their feet.
Alexei stopped abruptly on a rock shelf, steadies his mother as she stumbled into him.
He was pointing left, and she looked along his arm to see that they stood atop a cliff with the desert stretched out like a static ocean some 200 meters below. It lay there full of moon-silvered waves---shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted grayish blue of another escarpment.
"That's open desert," she said.
"A wide place to cross," Alexei said, and his voice was muffled by the filter trap across his face.
Alexandra glanced left and right---nothing but sand below.
Alexei stared straight ahead across the open dunes, watching the movement of shadows in the moon's passage. "About three or four kilometers across," he said.
"Wurms," she said.
"It's certain to be."
She focused on her weariness, the muscle ache that dulled her senses. "Shall we rest and eat?"
Alexei slipped out of the pack, sat down and leaned against it. Alexandra supported herself by a hand on his shoulder as she sank to the rock beside him. She felt Alexei turn as she settled herself, heard him scrabbling in the pack.
"Here," he said.
His hand felt dry against hers as he pressed two energy pills into her palm.
She swallowed them with a grudging spit of water from her stillsuit tube.
"Drink all your water," Alexei said. "Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You're stronger. Trust your stillsuit."
She obeyed, drained her catchpockets, feeling energy return. She thought then how peaceful it was here in this moment of their tiredness, and she recalled once hearing the minstrel-warrior Gustav Vasa said, "Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife."
Alexandra repeated the words to Alexei.
"That sounds like Gustav to me," he said.
She caught the tone of his voice, the way he spoke as of someone dead, though: And well poor Gustav might be dead. The Romanov forces were either dead or captive or lost like themselves in this waterless hellscape.
"Gustav always had the right quotation," Alexei said. "I can hear him now: 'And I shall make the rivers dry and sell the land into the hands of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers."
Alexandra closed her eyes, found herself moved closed to tears by the pathos in her son's voice.
Presently, Alexei said: "How do you----feel?"
She recognized that his question was directed at her pregnancy, said: "Your sister will not be born for many months yet. I still feel---physically fit."
And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my own son! Then, because it was the Bala Garrasaid way to seek within for the answer to such an oddity, she searched and found the source of her formality: I'm afraid of my son; I fear his strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.
Alexei pulled his hood down over his eyes, listened to the bug-hustling sounds of the night. His lungs were charged with his own silence. His nose itched. He rubbed it, removed the filter and grew conscious of the rich smell of cinnamon.
"There's smes' spice nearby," he said.
An elder wind feathered Alexei's cheeks, ruffled by the folds of his burnoose. But this wind carried no threat of storm; already he could sense the difference.
"It'll be dawn soon," he said.
Alexandra nodded.
"There's a way to get safely across that open sand," Alexei said. "The Szganys do it."
"What about the wurms?"
"If we were to plant a thumper from our Szganykit back in the rocks here," Alexei said. "It'd keep a wurm busy for a time."
She glanced at the stretch of moonlit desert between them and the other escarpment. "Four kilometers worth of time, yes?"
"Maybe. And if we crossed there making only natural sounds, the kind that don't attract the wurms...."
Alexei studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Szganykit manual that had come with their escape pack. He found it odd that all he sensed was pervasive terror at the thought of the wurms. He knew as if it lay just at the edge of his awareness that the wurms were to be respected and not feared....if.....if.....
He shook his head.
"It'd have to be sounds without rhythm," Alexandra said.
"What? Oh. Yes. If we broke our steps----the sand itself must shift down at times. Wurms can't investigate every little sound. We should be fully rested before we attempt it, though."
He looked across at that other rock wall, seeing the passage of time in the vertical moonshadows there. "It'll be dawn within the hour."
"Where'll we spend the day?" she asked.
Alexei turned left, pointed. "The cliff curves back north over there. You can see by the way it's wind-cut that it's the windward face. There'll be crevasses there, and deep ones, too."
"Hadn't we better get started?" she asked.
He stood, helped her to her feet. "Are you rested enough for the climb down? I want to get as close as possible to the desert floor before we camp."
"Enough." She nodded for him to lead the way.
He hesitated, then lifted the pack, settled into onto his shoulders and turned along the cliff.
If we only had suspensors, Alexandra thought. It'd be such a simple matter to jump down there. But maybe suspensors are another thing to avoid in the open desert. Maybe they attract the wurms the way a shield does.
They came to a series of shelves dropping down and, beyond them, saw a fissure with its ledge outlined by moonshadow leading along the vestibule.
Alexei led the way down, moving cautiously but hurrying because it was clear the moonlight would not last much longer. They wound down into a realm of deeper and deeper shadows. Hints of rock shape climbed to the stars around them. The fissure narrowed to some ten meters' width at the brink of a dim gray sandslope that slanted downward into darkness.
"Can we descend?" Alexandra whispered.
"Yes."
He tested the surface with one foot.
"We can slide down, in fact," he said. "I'll go first. Wait until you hear me stop."
"Be careful," she said.
He stepped onto the slope and slid and slipped down its soft surface onto an almost level floor of packed sand. The place was deep within the rock walls.
There came the sound of sand sliding behind him. He tried to see up the slope in the darkness but was nearly knocked over by the cascade. It trailed away to silence.
"Mother?" he said.
No answer.
"Mother?"
He dropped the pack, hurled himself up the slope, scrambling; digging, tossing sand like a wild man. "Mother!" he gasped. "Mother, where are you?"
Another cascade of sand swept down on him, burying him to the hips. He wrenched himself free of it.
She's been entrapped by the sandslide, he thought. Buried in it. I must be calm and work this out carefully. She won't smother right away. She'll compose herself in bindu suspension to reduce her oxygen needs. She knows I'll dig for her.
In the Bala Garrasaid way she'd taught him, Alexei stilled the savage beating of his heart, set his mind as a blank stare upon which the past few moments could write themselves. Every partial shift and twist of the slide replayed itself in his memory, moving with an inertial stateliness that contrasted with the fractional second of true time needed for the complete recall.
Presently, Alexei moved slantwise up the slope, probing cautiously until he found the wall of the fissure, an outcurve of rock there. He began to dig, moving the sand with care not to dislodge another slide. A piece of fabric came under his hands. He followed it, found an arm. Gently he traced the arm, exposed her face.
"Do you hear me?" he whispered.
No answer.
He dug faster, freed her shoulder. She was limp beneath his hands, but he detected a slow heartbeat.
Bindu suspension, he told himself.
He cleared the sand away to her waist, draped his arms over his shoulders and pulled downslope, slowly at first, then dragging her as fast as he could, feeling the sand, uttered the word to bring her out of the trance.
She woke up slowly, taking deeper and deeper breaths.
"I knew you'd find me," she whispered.
He looked back up the fissure. "It might've been kinder if I hadn't."
"Alexei!"
"I lost the pack," he said. "It's buried under a hundred tons of sand---at least."
"Everything?"
"The spare water, the stilltent---everything that matters." He touched a pocket. "I've still got the paracompass." He fumbled at the waist sash. "Knife and binoculars. We can get a good look around the place where we'll die."
In that instant, the sun lifted above the horizon somewhere to the left beyond the fissure's end. Colors blinked in the sand out on the open desert. A chorus of birds held forth their songs from hidden places among the rocks.
But Alexandra had eyes only for the despair in Alexei's face. She edged her voice with scorn, said: "Is this the way you were taught?"
"Do you not understand?" he asked. "Everything we need to survive in this place is under that sand."
"You found me," she said, and now her voice was soft and reasonable.
Alexei squatted back on his heels.
Presently, he looked up the fissure at the new slope, studying it, marking the looseness of the sand.
"If we could mobilize a small area of that slope and the upper face of a hole dug into the sand, we might be able to put down a shaft to the pack. Water might do it, but we don't have enough water for...." He broke off suddenly: "Foam."
Alexandra held herself to stillness lest she disturb the hyperfunctioning of his mind.
Alexei looked out at the open dunes, searching with his nostrils as well as his eyes, finding the direction and then centering his attention on a darkened patch of sand below them.
"Spice," he said. "Its essence---highly alkaline. And I've got the paracompass. It's power-pack is acid-based."
Alexandra sat up straight against the rock.
Alexei ignored her, leaped to his feet, and was off down the wind-compacted surface that spilled from the end of the fissure to the desert floor.
She watched the way he walked, breaking his stride---step---pause, step-step---slide---pause....
There was no rhythm to it that might tell a marauding wurm something not of this desert moved here.
Alexei reached the spice patch, shoved a mound of it into a fold of his robe, returned to the fissure. He spilled the spice onto the sand in front of Alexandra, squatted and began dismantling the paracompass, using the point of his knife. The compass face came off. He removed his sash, spread the compass parts on it, lifted out the power pack. The dial mechanism came out next, leaving an empty dished compartment in the instrument.
"You'll need water," Alexandr said.
Alexei took the catchtube from his neck, sucked up a mouthful, expelled it into the dishbed compartment.
If this fails, that's water wasted, Alexandra thought. But it won't matter then, anyway.
With his knife, Alexei cut open the power pack, spilled its crystals into the water They foamed slightly, then subsided.
Alexandra's eyes caught motion above them. She looked up to see a line of hawks along the rim of the fissure. They perched there staring down at the open water.
Great Mother! she thought. They can sense water even at that distance!
Alexei had the cover back on the paracompass, leaving off the reset button which gave a small hole into the liquid. Taking the reworked instrument in one hand, a handful of spice in the other, Alexei went back up the fissure, studying the lay of the slope. His robe billowed gently without the sash to hold it. He waded part-way up the slope, kicking off sand rivulets, spurts of dust.
Presently, he stopped, pressed a pinch of the spice into the paracompass, shook the instrument case.
Green foam boiled out of the hole where the reset button had been. Alexei aimed it at the slope, spread a low dike there, began kicking away the sand beneath it, immobilizing the opened face with more foam.
Alexandra moved to a position below him, called out: "May I help?"
"Come up and dig," he said. "We've about 3 meters to go. It's going to be a near thing." As he spoke, the foam stopped billowing from the instrument.
"Hurry," Alexei said. "There's no telling how long this foam will sustain the sand."
Alexandra scrambled up beside Alexei as he sifted another pinch of spice into the hole, shook the paracompass case. Again, foam boiled from it.
As Alexei directed the foam barrier, Alexandra dug with her hands, hurling the sand down the slope. "How deep?" she panted.
"About 3 meters," he said. "And I can only approximate our position. We may have to widen this hole." He moved a step aside, slipping in loose sand. "Slant your digging backwards. Don't go straight down."
Alexandra obeyed.
Slowly, the hole went down, reaching a level even with the floor of the basin and still no sign of the pack.
Did I somehow miscalculate? Alexei asked himself. I'm the one that panicked originally and caused this mistake. Has that warped my ability?
He looked at the paracompass. Less than 2 ounces of the acid infusion remained.
Alexandra straightened in the hole, rubbed a foam-stained hand across her cheek. Her eyes met Alexei's.
"The upper face," Alexei said. "Gently now." He added another pinch of spice to the container, sent the foam boiling around Alexandra's hands as she started cutting a vertical face in the upper slant of the hole. On the second pass, her hands encountered something hard. Slowly, she worked out a length of strap with a plastic buckle.
"Don't move any more of it," Alexei said and his voice was almost a whisper.
"We're out of foam."
Alexandra held the strap in one hand, looked up at him.
Alexei threw the empty paracompass down onto the floor of the basin and said: "Give me your other hand. Now listen carefully. I'm going to pull you to the side and downhill. Don't let go of that strap. We won't get much spill from the top. This slope has stabilized itself. All I'm going to aim for is to keep your head free of the sand. Once that hole's filled, we can dig you up and pull up the pack."
"I understand," she said.
"Ready?"
"Ready." She tensed her fingers on the strep.
With one surge, Alexei had her half out of the hole, holding her head up as the foam barrier gave way and sand spilled down. When it had subsided, Alexandra remained buried up to the waist, her left arm and shoulder still under the sand, her chin protected on a fold of Alexei's robe. Her shoulder ached from the strain upon it.
"I've still got the strap," she said.
Slowly, Alexei worked his hand into the sand beside her, found the strap. "Together," he said. "Steady pressure. We mustn't break it."
More sand spilled down as they worked the pack up. When the strap cleared the surface, Alexei stopped, freed his mother from the sand. Together they then pulled the pack downslope and out of its trap.
In a few minutes they stood on the floor of the fissure holding the pack between them.
Alexei looked at his mother. Foam stained her face, her robe. Sand was caked to where the foam had dried. She looked as if she had been a target for balls of wet, green sand.
"You look a mess," he said.
"You're not so pretty yourself," she said.
They began to laugh, then sobered.
"That shouldn't have happened," Alexei said. "I was careless."
She shrugged, feeling caked sand fall away from her robe.
"I'll erect the tent," he said. "You better slip off that robe and shake it out." He turned away, taking the pack.
Alexei nodded, suddenly too tired to answer.
"There are anchor holes in the rock," Alexei said. "Someone's tented here before."
Why not? she thought as she brushed at her robe. This was an ideal place, one deep within rock walls and facing another cliff some four kilometers away. This was far enough above the desert floor to avoid wurms but close enough for easy access before crossing.
She turned, seeing that Alexei had his tent erected, its rib-domed hemisphere blending with the rock walls of the fissure. Alexei stepped past her, lifting her binoculars. He adjusted their internal pressure with a fast twist, focused the oil lenses on the other cliff lifting golden tan in the morning light across the open sand.
Alexandra watched as he studied that apocalyptic landscape, his eyes probing into sand rivers and canyons.
"Yonder lies much lush vegetation," he said.
Alexandra found the spare binoculars in the pack beside the tent, moved up beside Alexei.
"There," he said, holding the binoculars with one hand and pointing with the other.
She looked where he pointed.
"Karnegiya," she said. "Scrawny stuff."
"There may be people nearby," Alexei said.
"That could be the ruins of a botanical testing station," she warned.
"This is pretty far south into the desert," he said. He lowered his binoculars, rubbed beneath his filter baffle, feeling how dry and chapped his lips were, sensing the dusty taste of thirst in his mouth. "This has the feeling of a Szgany place," he said.
"Can we be sure the Szganys will be friendly?" she asked.
"Holstein promised their help."
But there's desperation in the people of this desert, she thought. I felt some of it myself today. Desperate people might kill us for our water.
She shut her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a scene from Eser. There'd been a vacation trip once on Eser---she and the Duke Nicholas, before Alexei's birth. They'd flown over the southern jungles, above the weed-wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the river deltas. And they had seen the ant lines in the greenery---man-gangs carrying their loads on suspensor=buoyed shoulder poles. And in the sea reaches there'd been the white petals of trimaran junks.
All of it gone.
A spill of sand spread its brief curtain across the fissure's open end. The sand hissed down, loosened by gusts of morning breeze, by the hawks that were beginning to lift away from the clifftop. When the sandfall was gone, she still heard it hissing. It grew louder, a sound that once heard, was never forgotten.
"Wurm!" Alexei cried.
It came from their right with a callous majesty that was impossible to ignore. A twisting burrow-mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of sight. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water. Then it was gone, coursing off to the left.
The sound diminishe and died.
"I've seen space battleships that were smaller," Alexei whispered.146Please respect copyright.PENANA5IY97xLOeJ
She nodded, continuing to stare across the desert. Where the wurm had passed there remained that tantalizing gap. It flowed bitterly endless before them, beckoning beneath its horizontal collapse of skyline.
"When we've rested," Alexandra said, "we need to continue with your lessons."
He suppressed a sudden anger, said: "Mother, don't you think we could do without..."
"You panicked today," she said. "You know your mind and bindunervature perhaps better than do I, but you've much to learn about your body's prana-musculature. The body does things of itself sometimes, Alexei, and I can teach you about this. You must learn to control every muscle, every fiber of your body. You need review of your hands. We'll start with finger muscles, palm tendons, and tip sensitivity." She turned away. "Now, into the tent with you."
He flexed the fingers of his left hand, watching her crawl through the sphincter valve, knowing that he could not deflect her from this determination---to that he must agree.146Please respect copyright.PENANAnaYnRID6WX
Whatever's been done to me, I've been a party to it, he thought.
Review of the hand!
He looked at his hand. How inadequate it seemed when measured against such creatures as that wurm.
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