Dune (40 page)

“In a moment.”

Paul stepped out onto the rock shingle, shouldered the pack and adjusted its
straps. He stood a moment with a paracompass in his hands.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

She pushed herself away from the rock, feeling her strength return. “Which
direction?”

“Where this ridge leads.” He pointed.

“Deep into the desert,” she said.

“The Fremen desert,” Paul whispered.

And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient
vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of
the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared
into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect
registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted
and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless.

Idaho was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now Idaho is dead.

“Do you see a way to go?” Jessica 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.

Paul headed for the first ledge, clambered onto it. Jessica followed.

She noted presently how their passage became a matter of the immediate and
particular–the sand pockets between rocks where their steps were slowed, the
wind-?carved ridge that cut their hands, the obstruction that forced a choice: Go
over or go around? The terrain enforced its own rhythms. They spoke only when
necessary 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’s at our backs and it’d show our movement
to anyone out there.”

Paul stopped in a bight of rock, leaned the pack against a narrow ledge.

Jessica leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Paul
pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted
brackish, and she remembered the waters of Caladan–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 . . . truly rest.

It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment.
There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.

Paul pushed away from the rock ledge, turned, and climbed over a sloping
surface. Jessica 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.

Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in
substances beneath their feet and hands–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.

Paul stopped abruptly on a rock shelf, steadied 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 two hundred
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 gray blur of
another escarpment.

“Open desert,” she said.

“A wide place to cross,” Paul said, and his voice was muffled by the filter
trap across his face.

Jessica glanced left and right–nothing but sand below.

Paul 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.

“Worms,” she said.

“Sure to be.”

She focused on her weariness, the muscle ache that dulled her senses. “Shall
we rest and eat?”

Paul slipped out of the pack, sat down and leaned against it. Jessica
supported herself by a hand on his shoulder as she sank to the rock beside him.
She felt Paul 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 capsules into her
palm

She swallowed them with a grudging spit of water from her stillsuit tube.

“Drink all your water,” Paul 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 Gurney Halleck say, “Better a dry
morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.”

Jessica repeated the words to Paul.

“That was Gurney,” he said.
She caught the tone of his voice, the way he spoke as of someone dead,
thought: And well poor Gurney might be dead. The Atreides forces were either
dead or captive or lost like themselves in this waterless void.

“Gurney always had the right quotation,” Paul said. “I can hear him now:
‘And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked;
and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of
strangers.’ ”

Jessica closed her eyes, found herself moved close to tears by the pathos in
her son’s voice.

Presently, Paul said: “How do you . . . feel?”

She recognized that his question was directed at her pregnancy, said: “Your
sister won’t be born for many months yet. I still feel . . . physically
adequate.”

And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my own son! Then, because it
was the Bene Gesserit 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.

Paul 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 melange spice nearby,” he said.

An eider wind feathered Paul’s cheeks, ruffled the folds of his burnoose.
But this wind carried no threat of storm; already he could sense the difference.

“Dawn soon,” he said.

Jessica nodded.

“There’s a way to get safely across that open sand,” Paul said. “The Fremen
do it.”

“The worms?”

“If we were to plant a thumper from our Fremkit back in the rocks here,”
Paul said. “It’d keep a worm occupied for a time.”

She glanced at the stretch of moonlighted desert between them and the other
escarpment. “Four kilometers worth of time?”

“Perhaps. And if we crossed there making only natural sounds, the kind that
don’t attract the worms . . . ”

Paul studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the
mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Fremkit manual that had
come with their escape pack. He found it odd that all he sensed was pervasive
terror at thought of the worms. He knew as though it lay just at the edge of his
awareness that the worms were to be respected and not feared . . . if . . . if .
. .

He shook his head.

“It’d have to be sounds without rhythm,” Jessica said.

“What? Oh. Yes. If we broke our steps . . . the sand itself must shift down
at times. Worms can’t investigate every little sound. We should be fully rested
before we try 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.

Paul turned left, pointed. “The cliff curves back north over there. You can
see by the way it’s wind-?cut that’s the windward face. There’ll be crevasses
there, deep ones.”

“Had we better get started?” she asked.

He stood, helped her to her feet. “Are you rested enough for a 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 it onto his shoulders and turned
along the cliff.
If only we had suspensors, Jessica thought. It’d be such a simple matter to
jump down there. But perhaps suspensors are another thing to avoid in the open
desert. Maybe they attract the worms 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.

Paul led the way down, moving cautiously but hurrying because it was obvious
the moonlight could not last much longer. They wound down into a world 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 do down?” Jessica whispered.

“I think so.”

He tested the surface with one foot.

“We can slide down,” he said. “I’ll go first. Wait until you hear me stop.”

“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, was almost knocked over by the cascade. It trailed away
to silence.

“Mother?” he said.

There was no answer.

“Mother?”

He dropped the pack, hurled himself up the slope, scrambling, digging,
throwing 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 out of it.

She’s been caught in the sandslide, he thought. Buried in it. I must be calm
and work this out carefully. She won’t smother immediately. She’ll compose
herself in bindu suspension to reduce her oxygen needs. She knows I’ll dig for
her.

In the Bene Gesserit way she had taught him, Paul stilled the savage beating
of his heart, set his mind as a blank slate 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 interior stateliness that contrasted with
the fractional second of real time required for the total recall.

Presently, Paul 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 shoulders. 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 her arms over his shoulders
and pulled downslope, slowly at first, then dragging her as fast as he could,
feeling the sand give way above. Faster and faster he pulled her, gasping with
the effort, fighting to keep his balance. He was out on the hard-?packed floor of
the fissure then, swinging her to his shoulder and breaking into a staggering
run as the entire sandslope came down with a loud hiss that echoed and was
magnified within the rock walls.

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 hyper-?functioning 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.”