Dune (43 page)

He stopped at the end of the fissure where it looked out on the desert's marching dunes some thirty meters below. Gently, he lowered her to the sand, uttered the word to bring her out of the catalepsis.

She awakened slowly, taking deeper and deeper breaths.

“I knew you'd find me,” she whispered.

He looked back up the fissure. “It might have been kinder if I hadn't.”

“Paul!”

“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 counts.” He touched a pocket. “I still have 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 end of the fissure. 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 Jessica had eyes only for the despair in Paul's face. She edged her voice with scorn, said: “Is this the way you were taught?”

“Don't you 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, reasonable.

Paul 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 immobilize 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, then: “Foam.”

Jessica held herself to stillness lest she disturb the hyperfunctioning of his mind.

Paul 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 have the paracompass. Its power pack is acid-base.”

Jessica sat up straight against the rock.

Paul 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's 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 worm something not of the desert moved here.

Paul reached the spice patch, shoveled a mound of it into a fold of his robe, returned to the fissure. He spilled the spice onto the sand in front of Jessica, 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,” Jessica said.

Paul took the catchtube from his neck, sucked up a mouthful, expelled it into the dished compartment.

With his knife, Paul cut open the power pack, spilled its crystals into the water. They foamed slightly, subsided.

Jessica'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.

Paul 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, Paul 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 the 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. Paul aimed it at the slope, spread a low dike there, began kicking away the sand beneath it, immobilizing the opened face with more foam.

Jessica moved to a position below him, called out: “May I help?”

“Come up and dig,” he said. “We've about three meters to go. It's going to be a near thing.” As he spoke, the foam stopped billowing from the instrument.

“Quickly,” Paul said. “No telling how long this foam will hold the sand.”

Jessica scrambled up beside Paul as he sifted another pinch of spice into the hole, shook the paracompass case. Again, foam boiled from it.

As Paul directed the foam barrier, Jessica dug with her hands, hurling the sand down the slope. “How deep?” she panted.

“About three meters,” he said. “And I can only approximate the position. We may have to widen this hole.” He moved a step aside, slipping in loose sand. “Slant your digging backward. Don't go straight down.”

Jessica obeyed.

Slowly, the hole went down, reaching a level even with the floor of the basin and still no sign of the pack.

Could I have miscalculated?
Paul 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 two ounces of the acid infusion remained.

Jessica straightened in the hole, rubbed a foam-stained hand across her cheek. Her eyes met Paul's.

“The upper face,” Paul said. “Gently, now.” He added another pinch of spice to the container, sent the foam boiling around Jessica's hands as she began 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,” Paul said and his voice was almost a whisper.

“We're out of foam.”

Jessica held the strap in one hand, looked up at him.

Paul threw the empty paracompass down onto the floor of the basin, 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 more 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 out and pull up the pack.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Ready?”

“Ready.” She tensed her fingers on the strap.

With one surge, Paul 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, Jessica remained buried to the waist, her left arm and shoulder still under the sand, her chin protected on a fold of Paul's robe. Her shoulder ached from the strain put on it.

“I still have the strap,” she said.

Slowly, Paul 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, Paul stopped, freed his mother from the sand. Together then they 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.

Paul looked at his mother. Foam strained her face, her robe. Sand was caked to her where the foam had dried. She looked as though 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 started to laugh, then sobered.

“That shouldn't have happened,” Paul said. “I was careless.”

She shrugged, feeling caked sand fall away from her robe.

“I'll put up the tent,” he said. “Better slip off that robe and shake it out.” He turned away, taking the pack.

Jessica nodded, suddenly too tired to answer.

“There's anchor holes in the rock,” Paul said. “Someone's tented here before.”

Why not?
she thought as she brushed at her robe. This was a likely place—deep in rock walls and facing another cliff some four kilometers away—far enough above the desert to avoid worms but close enough for easy access before a crossing.

She turned, seeing that Paul had the tent up, its rib-domed hemisphere blending with the rock walls of the fissure. Paul stepped past her, lifting his binoculars. He adjusted their internal pressure with a quick twist, focused the oil lenses on the other cliff, lifting golden tan in morning light across open sand.

Jessica watched as he studied that apocalyptic landscape, his eyes probing into sand rivers and canyons.

“There are growing things over there,” he said.

Jessica found the spare binoculars in the pack beside the tent, moved up beside Paul.

“There,” he said, holding the binoculars with one hand and pointing with the other.

She looked where he pointed.

“Saguaro,” she said. “Scrawny stuff.”

“There may be people nearby,” Paul said.

“That could be the remains 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 Fremen place,” he said.

“Are we certain the Fremen will be friendly?” she asked.

“Kynes 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 closed her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a scene from Caladan. There had been a vacation trip once on Caladan—she and the Duke Leto, before Paul's birth. They'd flown over the southern jungles, above the weed-wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the 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 dhows.

All of it gone.

Jessica opened her eyes to the desert stillness, to the mounting warmth of the day. Restless heat devils were beginning to set the air aquiver out on the open sand. The other rock face across from them was like a thing seen through cheap glass.

A spill of sand spread its brief curtain across the open end of the fissure. The sand hissed down, loosed by puffs of morning breeze, by the hawks that were beginning to lift away from the clifftop. When the sand-fall was gone, she still heard it hissing. It grew louder, a sound that once heard, was never forgotten.

“Worm,” Paul whispered.

It came from their right with an uncaring majesty that could not be ignored. A twisting burrow-mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of vision. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water. Then it was gone, coursing off to the left.

The sound diminished, died.

“I've seen space frigates that were smaller,” Paul whispered.

She nodded, continuing to stare across the desert. Where the worm had passed there remained that tantalizing gap. It flowed bitterly endless before them, beckoning beneath its horizontal collapse of skyline.

“When we've rested,” Jessica said, “we should continue with your lessons.”

He suppressed a sudden anger, said: “Mother, don't you think we could do without . . . .”

“Today you panicked,” she said. “You know your mind and bindu-nervature perhaps better than I do, but you've much yet to learn about your body's prana-musculature. The body does things of itself sometimes, Paul, and I can teach you about this. You must learn to control every muscle, every fiber of your body. You need review of the hands. We'll start with finger muscles, palm tendons, and tip sensitivity.” She turned away. “Come, into the tent, now.”

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 . . . that he must agree.

Whatever has 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 appeared when measured against such creatures as that worm.

 

“SO YOU'RE the great Gurney Halleck,” the man said.

Halleck stood staring across the round cavern office at the smuggler seated behind a metal desk. The man wore Fremen robes and had the half-tint blue eyes that told of off-planet foods in his diet. The office duplicated a space frigate's master control center—communications and viewscreens along a thirty-degree arc of wall, remote arming and firing banks adjoining, and the desk formed as a wall projection—part of the remaining curve.

“I am Staban Tuek, son of Esmar Tuek,” the smuggler said.

“Then you're the one I owe thanks for the help we've received,” Halleck said.

“Ah-h-h, gratitude,” the smuggler said. “Sit down.”

A ship-type bucket seat emerged from the wall beside the screens and Halleck sank onto it with a sigh, feeling his weariness. He could see his own reflection now in a dark surface beside the smuggler and scowled at the lines of fatigue in his lumpy face. The inkvine scar along his jaw writhed with the scowl.