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Alexei stood outside the stilltent in the late afternoon. The crevasse where he had pitched their camp lay in deep shadow. He stared out across the open sand at the distant cliff, wondering if he should awaken his mother, who lay sleeping in the tent.
Folds upon folds of dunes spread beyond their shelter. Away from the setting sun, the dunes exposed greased shadows so black as to be like bits of night.
And the flatness.
HIs mind searched for something tall in that landscape. But there was no persuading tallness out of head-addled air and that horizon---no bloom or gently shaken thing to mark the passage of a breeze---only dunes and that distant cliff beneath a sky of burnished silver-blue.
What if there isn't one of the abandoned testing stations across there? he wondered. What if there are no Szganys, either, and the plants we see are just an accident?
Without the tent, Alexandra awakened, turned onto her back and peered sidelong out the transparent end at Alexei. He stood with his back to her and something about his stance reminded her of his father. She sensed the well of grief rising inside her and turned away.
Presently, she adjusted her stillsuit, refreshed herself with water from the tent's catchpocket, and slipped out to stand and stretch the sleep from her muscles.
Alexei spoke without turning: "I find the silence here quite pleasant."
How the mind tailors itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bala Garrasaid axiom: "The mind can go either direction under duress---towards positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training."
"It could be a good life here," Alexei said.
She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Alexei had glimpsed. One could be alone out here, she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the stalker.
She stepped past Alexei, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, sereusa in the arroyos and other spiny growths---and a mating of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.
"I'll break camp," said Alexei.
Alexandra nodded, walked to the fissure's mouth to where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of filthy tan at its edges--- a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said something else: water! At some time, water had flowed across that burning white. She lowered her binoculars, adjusted her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Alexei's movements.
Stars!
She stared up at them, sensing Alexei's movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift towards the stars. The weight of day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.
"The first moon will rise soon," Alexei said. "The pack is prepared. I've planted the beater."
We could be lost forever in this hellscape, she thought. And who would know or care?
"Do you smell that?" Alexei asked.
"I can smell it even through the filter," she said. "Riches. But will it buy water?" She pointed across the basin. "There are no artificial lights there."
"Szganys would be hidden in a s'yetche behind those rocks," he said.
A sill silver pushed above the horizon to the right of them: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Alexandra studied the silvery white of sand exposed in the moonlight.
"I planted the beater in the deepest part of the crevasse," Alexei said. "Whenever I light its candle it'll give us about thirty minutes.
"Only thirty minutes?"
"Before it starts calling----a----wurm."
"Oh. I'm ready to go."
He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.
The night is a long tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow....if there is a tomorrow. She shook her head. Why do I have to be so morbid? I was trained better than that!"
Alexei returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound---the desert's own code spelling out its measure of safety.
"We must walk without rhythm," Alexei said and he called up his memories of men walking the sand----both prescient memory and real memory.
"Watch how I do this," he said. "This is the Szgany way of sandwalking."
He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following its curve, moving with a dragging pace.
Alexandra studied his progress for ten paces, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand---like the wind. But muscles protested the unnatural, broken pattern: Step---drag---drag---step---step----wait----drag----step----
Time expanded around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no closer. The one behind still towered high.
"Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!"
It was a drumming from the cliff behind.
"The beater," Alexei hissed.
It's pounding continued and they found it hard to avoid its rhythm in their stride.
"Thump---thump---thump---thump---thump----"
They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through the spilling dunes: step---drag---wait---step----Across pea sand that rolled beneath their feet: drag----pause----step-----
All the while their ears searching for that special hissing.
The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew---louder and louder----out the west.
"Thum----thump----thump----thump----" drummed the beater.
The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing wurm.
"Keep moving and don't look back," Alexei whispered.
A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.
"Keep moving," Alexei repeated.
He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the 2 rock faces---the one ahead and the one behind----appeared equally remote.
And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.
On and on they went----Muscles reached a stage of mechanical acting that seemed to stretch out to infinity, but Alexei saw that the beckoning escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.
Alexei kept moving in a void of concentration, aware that the presence of her will alone kept her walking. Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit's catchpockets.
"Thump---thump...."
Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.
Silence!
"Faster!" Alexei whispered.
She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to tell herself it was necessary to demand even more from muscles that already were being taxed to their limits----the unnatural movement.....
The rock face of safety ahead of them climbed into the stars, and Alexei saw a plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary outhrusting of a foot.
Resonant booming shook the sand around them.
Alexei lurched sideways two steps.
"Boom! Boom!"
"Drum sand!" Alexandra hissed.
Alexei recovered his balance. One sweeping glanced took in the sand around them, the rock escarpment perhaps 200 meters away.
Behind them, he heard a hissing----like the wind, like a riptide where there was no water.
"Run!" Alexandra screamed. "Alexei, run!"
They ran.
Drum sounds boomed beneath their feet. Then they were out of it and into pea gravel. For a time, the running was a relief to muscles that ached from unfamiliar, rhythmless use. Here was action that could be understood. Here was rhythm. But sand and gravel dragged at their feet. And the hissing approach of the wurm was storm sound that grew around them.
Alexandra stumbled to her knees. All she could think of was the fatigue, the sound, the terror.
Alexei dragged her up.
They ran on, hand in hand.
A thin pole jutting from the sand ahead of them. They passed it, saw another.
Alexandra's mind failed to register on the poles until they were past.
There was another---a wind etched surface thrust up from a crack in the rock.
Then another.
Rock!
She felt it through her feet, the shock of unyielding surface, gained new strength from the firmer footing.
A deep crack stretched its vertical shadow upward into the cliff ahead of them. They sprinted for it, crowded into the narrow hole.
Behind them, the sound of the wurm's passage ceased.
Alexandra and Alexei turned, peered out into the desert.
Where the dunes began, maybe fifty meters away at the foot of a rock beach, a silver-gray curve broached from the desert, sending rivers of sand and dust cascading all around them. It lifted higher, resolved into a massive black, armored beak with no eyes. The beak opened up like a grotesque flower; it consisted of a wide upper jaw, a thinner lower jaw, and a pair of hooked mandibles on either side, both of them glistening in the pale moonlight.
The beak snaked towards the narrow crack where Alexandra and Alexei huddled. Cinnamon yelled in their nostrils. Moonlight flashed from crystal teeth.
To and fro wove the great beak.
Alexei stifled his breathing.
Alexandra crouched staring.
It took intense concentration of her Bala Garrasaid training to put down the primal terrors, subduing a race-memory fear that threatened to cloud her mind.
Alexei felt a kind of elation. In some recent instant, he had crossed a time barrier into more unknown territory. He could sense the darkness ahead, nothing revealed to his inner eye. It was as if some step he'd taken had plunged him into a well...or into the trough of a wave where the future was invisible. The landscape had undergone a profound shifting.
Rather than frighten him, the sensation of time-darkness forced a hyperacceleration of his other senses. He found himself registering every available aspect of the thing that lifted from the sand there seeking him. Its beak was some 80 meters in diameter---crystal teeth with the serrated shape of crysnozhi glinting around the upper and lower mandibles---the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle aldehydes....acids.....
The whale blotted out the moonlight as it brushed the rocks above them. A shower of small stones and sand cascaded into the narrow hiding place.
Alexei crowded his mother farther back.
Cinnamon!
The smell of it flooded across him.
What has the wurm to do with the spice smes'? he asked himself. He remembered Leet-Holstein betraying a veiled reference to some connection between wurms and spice.
"Barrrroooooommmmmm!"
It was like a peal of dry thunder coming from far off to their right.
The wurm drew back into the sand, lay there momentarily, its crystal teeth weaving moonflashes.
"Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!"
Another beater!" Alexei thought.
Again, it sounded off to their right.
A shudder passed through the wurm. It drew further away into the sand. Only a mounded upper curve remained like half a bell mouth, the curve of a tunnel rearing above the dunes.
Sand rasped.
The creature sank further, retreating and turning. It became a mound of cresting sand that curved away through a saddle in the dunes.
Alexei stepped out of the crack, watched the sand wave recede across the waste towards the new beater summons.
Alexandra followed, listening; "Thump----thump---thump----thump----thump----"
And then the sound stopped.
Alexei found the tube into his stillsuit, sipped at the reclaimed water.
Alexandra focused on his action, but her mind felt blank with fatigue and the aftermath of horror. "Has it gone for real?" she whispered.
"Someone has summoned the beast," Alexei said. "Szganys."
She felt herself recovering. "It was gargantuan!"
"It was not as big as the one that ate our 'majigger."
"Are you sure it was Szgany?"
"They used a beater."
"Why would they help us?"
"They weren't. They were just summoning a wurm."
"Why would they do that?"
An answer lay poised at the edge of his awareness but refused to come. He had a vision in his mind of something to do with the telescoping barbed sticks in their packs----the "maker hooks."
"Why would they call a wurm?" Alexandra asked.
A chill of fear seeped into his brain, and he forced himself to turn away from his mother, to look up the cliff. "We'd better find a way up there before daylight." He pointed. "Those poles we passed---there are more of them."
She looked, following the line of his hand, saw the pole----wind-scratched markers----made out of the shadow of a narrow ledge that twisted into a crevasse high above them.
"They mark a way up the cliff," Alexei said. He settled his shoulders into the pack, crossed to the foot of the ledge and started the climb upward.
Alexandra hesitated a moment, resting, restoring her strength; then she followed.
Up they climbed, following the guide poles until the ledge dwindled to a narrow lip at the mouth of a dark crevasse.
Alexei tipped his head to peer into the shadowed place. He could feel the precarious hold his feet had on the slender ledge but forced himself to slow caution. He saw only darkness inside the crevasse. It stretched away upward, open to the stars at the top. His ears searched, found just sounds he could expect---a tiny spill of sand, an insect birr, the patter of a small running creature. He tested the darkness in the crevasse with one foot, found rock beneath a gritting surface. Slowly, he inched around the corner, signaled for his mother to follow. He grasped a loose edge of her robe, helped her around.
They looked up at starlight framed by two rock lips. Alexei saw his mother beside him as a cloudy gray movement. "If we could only risk a light," he whispered.
"We have other senses than sight," she said.
Alexei slid a foot forward, shifted his weight, and probed with the other foot, met an obstruction. He lifted his foot, found a step, pulled himself up onto it. He reached back, felt his mother's arm, tugged at her robe for her to follow.
Another step.....
"It goes on up to the top, I think," he whispered.
Shallow and even more steps, Alexandra thought. Man-carved beyond the shadow of a doubt.
She followed the shadowy movement of Alexei's progress, feeling out the steps. Rock walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed them. The steps ended in a slitted defile about 20 meters long, its floor level, and this opened onto a shallow, moonlit basin.
Alexei stepped out of the basin's rim and whispered: "What a beautiful place!"
Alexandra could only stare in mute agreement from her position a step behind him.
Despite weariness, the irritation of recaths and nose plugs and the confinement of the stillsuit, despite fear and aching desire for rest, this basin's beauty filled her senses, forcing her to stop and admire it.
"It's just like a fairyland," Alexei whispered.
Alexandra nodded.
Spreading away in front of her stretched desert growth---bushes, cacti, tiny leaf clumps---all trembling in the moonlight. The ringwalls were dark to her left, moonfrosted on her right.
"Szganys live here, evidently," Alexei said.
"There would have to be people for this many plants to survive," she agreed. She uncapped the tube to her stillsuit's catchpockets, sipped at it. Warm, faintly bitter wetness slipped down her throat. She marked how it refreshed her. The tube's cap grated against flakes of sand as she replaced it.
Movement caught Alexei's attention----to his right and down on the basin floor curving out beneath them. He stared down through smoke bushes and weeds into a wedged slab sand-surface of moonlight inhabited by an up-hop, jump, pop-hop of tiny motion.
"Mice!" he hissed.
Pop-hop-hop! they went, into shadows and out.
Something fell soundlessly past their eyes into the mice. There came a thin screech, a flapping of wings, and a ghostly gray bird lifted away across sentinel tsereusa and spiked paintbrush. There was a low humming of light here more basic in its harmony than any other music in his universe.
"We'd best find a place to pitch the tent," he said. "Tomorrow we can try to find the Szganys who...."
"Most intruders here regret finding the Szganys!"
It was a heavy masculine voice chopping across his words, shattering the moment. The voice came above them and to their right.
"Please do not run, strangers," the voice said as Alexei made to withdraw into the defile. "If you run, you'll only waste your body's water."
They want us for the water of our flesh! Alexandra thought. Her muscles overrode all fatigue, flowed into maximum readiness without external betrayal. She pinpointed the location of the voice, thinking: Suck stealth! I didn't hear him. She realized that the owner of that voice had permitted himself only the small sounds, the natural sounds of the desert.
Another voice called from the basin's rim to their left. "Make it quick, Ropt-Zutt. Get their water and let's be on our way. We've got little enough time before dawn."
Alexei, less conditioned to emergency response than his mother, felt chagrin that he'd stiffened and tried to withdraw, that he had clouded his abilities by a momentary panic. He forced himself now to obey her teachings: relax, then fall into the semblance of a trance, then into the arrested whipsnap of muscles that can slash in any direction.
Still, he felt the edge of fear inside him and he knew its source. This was blind time, no future he had seen---and they were caught between wild Szganys whose only interest was the water carried in the flesh of two unbarriered bodies.
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