Road to Dune (23 page)

At a sound on her left, Dorothy looked in that direction, past Dr. Yueh.

Striding through a doorway, Valdemar Hoskanner smiled smugly at her. Without a word, he took a seat in a chair beside the throne, as if he belonged there.

30

There is always a way to escape from any trap, if one only has the eyes to see it.

—GENERAL ESMAR TUEK,
Security Briefings

S
pinning and sliding, Jesse plunged into an empty, suffocating hell. The vortex sucked him downward, seemingly to the very core of Duneworld. His elbows and shoulders banged against oddly smooth rock, as if he were sliding down a stone throat.

Dust clogged his mouth, nose, and eyes. He tried to cough but could hardly breathe. Flailing helplessly, unable to stop the swift, bumpy descent, he was dragged deeper and deeper down an endless waterfall of sand. He had watched William English being sucked to his death. No one had ever emerged alive from a sand whirlpool.

Nevertheless, Jesse struggled for his life.

Though his eyes were squeezed shut and burning from the grit, he saw tiny flashes of light behind his eyelids, followed by blackness deeper than the Stygian realm of sleep. He needed air, but couldn’t breathe. Sand rushed past him, roaring and scouring, threatening to suffocate him.

Abruptly, a bubble of exhaled gas and fumes burst around him, pushing away the murderous dust, allowing him one choking breath of sulfurous gases that contained just enough oxygen for him to survive a few seconds longer.

In his fading thoughts, Jesse remembered Barri’s determined, optimistic face. The boy always focused on solving problems, striving to make his father proud. As Jesse tumbled, he thought of Dorothy, his beloved concubine. Such a strong-willed woman! His heart ached for her, and he knew she could not possibly have betrayed House Linkam. Esmar Tuek, despite his skills, had to be mistaken about her.

Too often, he had kept his own feelings locked up, not telling her the depth of his love. As the head of House Linkam, he had always tried to be self-sufficient and firm, avoiding the foolish behavior of his father and brother. Regrets cascaded around him, flowing like the sands as he plunged deeper into Duneworld. He wished he could have one last moment with Dorothy, and with Barri.

No excavation would ever find him. He would vanish like so many others. Everyone would assume the sandworm had devoured him. Now, at the culmination of his spice challenge, just when he was about to achieve victory, this capricious planet had stolen it all from him.

In a measure of defiance, Jesse blew one last breath from his lungs with an angry, exhausted shout. Sand and dust coughed out of his mouth—

Unexpectedly, he tumbled through an open void and landed on a soft mound of sand that had rained down from above. The impact was enough to knock the little remaining wind out of him. Stunned and disoriented, he sucked in huge lungfuls of humid air that reeked of bitter cinnamon, like a spice harvester’s exhaust stack. But it tasted incredibly sweet in his lungs, breathable air! With his every gasp, the melange essence seemed to reinvigorate his nerves and his muscles.

Jesse rolled over and got to his hands and knees, coughing grit, shaking his dust-encrusted head. He shuddered for a long moment, gulping breaths to replenish the oxygen in his bloodstream. Bits of sand continued to fall like gentle rain on top of him, then stopped.

Questions clamored in his head. Where was he? How far had he fallen?

This deep underground, he had expected to see nothing but inky darkness, yet a faint blue phosphorescence clung to the walls around him, and he could make out a series of tunnels stretching in all directions, a honeycomb labyrinth beneath the dunes. His eyes adjusted surprisingly well.

Jesse struggled to his feet, though his entire body felt bruised, and his arms and legs were scraped raw in places. The spice vapors seemed to enhance his senses and sharpen his vision. Frantically, more energized than he had imagined he could be, he ran through one passageway after another until he grew short of breath. Realizing he could lose track of the original place he had fallen, Jesse tried to retrace his steps, using a sharp stone to scrape a mark on the walls at each intersection. He seemed to be in a crisscrossing network, like blue blood vessels beneath the sand.

Dr. Haynes had postulated that the dune seas of this world had tides and movements, exhalations and fumaroles that hinted at mysteries far beneath the surface. Jesse wondered if he would ever be able to tell the planetary ecologist, or anyone else, what he was seeing here … .

With one shaky footstep, then another, he continued to explore the subterranean paths. He needed to find a way
out,
he realized, not his way back to the mound of sand. He had no inkling of which direction he might go or how he might ever get back to the surface. Jesse had fallen so far, he doubted he could climb up the stone throat again. He needed to find a different route—or remain down here forever.

A passageway opened into a large grotto, where the bluish light grew brighter. He could discern shapes around him now—bizarre, alien forms, living things that he had never guessed might exist in the arid vastness, a bizarre wonderland of life and energy.

He heard eerie rustling noises: the movement of spongy forms that rose from the tunnel floor on huge blue stalks with wide, soft leaves. They reminded him of bulbous fungi, plants with rings around their trunks and stalks that swayed and opened up smacking mouths. Their forms hinted strangely of sandworms that were rooted to the ground.

An incomprehensible nursery of exotic fungusoid plants surged and waved around the grotto, piling layer upon fleshy layer. As segmented stems bent over, round orifices coughed out a powdery mist of blue spores that smelled of spice but oddly seemed the wrong color, not reddish or rust-colored at all.

With sparkling eyes, Jesse strolled through the odd subterranean warren. The fungusoid plants drifted like kelp in an ocean current. In a frenzy of fecundity, the stems grew visibly before his eyes, rising taller and taller. Leaves like rounded hands flopped out of the ringed stalks, then fell off and took root themselves, spawning secondary waves of growth.

Jesse continued walking, exploring the freakish milieu. He wondered if his senses had been overloaded by all the melange wafting through the air. He had heard of the bad effects of extreme spice overdose. Was this all a hallucination?

Then he came upon a skeleton. A desiccated, mummified cadaver sprawled on the ground with a tattered sandminer’s uniform. Jesse stared, afraid for a moment that he had found William English, but the clothes were wrong. Other men had been lost in the desert, dragged down into sand whirlpools. This victim had not been able to find his way out … .

Jesse continued walking and then running, faster and faster. Now, however, he did not get short of breath. Inside his body, Jesse discovered a tremendous, mounting energy—and he covered a great distance through the tunnels, chambers, and grottoes without pausing to rest.

Inside a towering chamber of rock, volcanic light added a yellow-and-orange glow to the pale phosphorescence. Shafts of exhaled brimstone vapors curled upward toward the surface. He realized that he must be standing at the root of one of the fumaroles.

The rubbery spice plants grew even thicker there, clustered around the nourishing gas vents. They rose like overfertilized magical beanstalks, clogging the passage and seeking a way to the dunes above … .

Time faded for Jesse as he moved relentlessly onward, covering many kilometers, with the melange-impregnated air buoying him along. Though he had no way of telling time, he guessed that many hours or even days had already passed. How long could he last down here? He never felt a need to rest, but he did fear that his body would eventually burn out from its hyperprocessed, restless energy. Long-distance space travelers consumed only spice during their journeys across the Known Universe. The substance supposedly gave them all the nourishment they required.

Had word of his death reached Dorothy in Carthage? Did his demise mean that his family automatically forfeited the Hoskanner challenge? Or could Barri, as his heir, reap the benefits ? He had intentionally left no proxy behind, no one who could make binding decisions for the household. Would the Emperor just seize it all and ruin House Linkam, much as William English’s family had been ruined, generations ago?

There are no rules.

Jesse paused in his underground journey, then pushed forward again, regaining his determination and resolve. He was not dead yet. He would not give up. There must be a way out.

Far ahead, he heard a rushing noise as powder tumbled from a new surface opening. A sand whirlpool high above had dropped open to let a flood of sand drain down like time grains through an hourglass. Fumes from another volcanic vent swirled upward like smoke exiting a chimney, and the blue spice plants reached toward the ceiling, groping for a way out.

Jesse stared as a possibility occurred to him. It was a decent chance, he decided—and he knew of no better way out.

As the fleshy growths clustered together, stretching upward like the hands of clamoring beggars, he dove into them. The rising mass of vegetation jostled and lifted. He climbed higher on the spongy flesh, holding on and hoping that the vent in the rocks was wide enough to permit his body to pass.

Around him, he felt the verdant upsurge gain strength as more and more plants shoved toward the surface of the desert planet. One of the nearest fleshy mouths opened like a blossom and exhaled a cloud of choking cinnamon into his face and eyes, but Jesse did not let go. He felt himself being carried upward, gaining speed. The rock walls rushed and scraped past him, cutting his skin as he was pushed higher.

Then, like a drowning man reaching the surface of an ocean, the profusion of growths exploded into open sky, vomiting great gouts of cinnamony, rust-colored powder.

Jesse found himself flying through the air like a rag doll. Moments later, he crashed against the slope of a hard-packed dune. Coughing and shuddering, he scrambled to his feet. Staggering into bright sunlight, he saw the swarm of spice plants still boiling up out of the blow, turning from blue to brown in the air and spraying melange, dumping a rich, reddish carpet in all directions.

As he watched, the fungi withered, dried, and fell into a mat across the sandy ground. Within seconds of exposure to the desiccated air, the spice plants crumbled and flaked, becoming a layer of rich melange.

Sunlight—real sunlight—burned his eyes. Shading his vision with one hand, Jesse felt himself adapting to the outside air. It was daybreak, with lemon yellow and tan hues creeping through the sky.

Lost in the midst of the vast desert, Jesse turned in all directions, trying to spot a landmark. Everything around him looked scoured and clean. The Coriolis storm must have passed. He could not even hazard a guess as to how long he had been gone.

Then, like a miracle, he saw a line of mountains on the eastern horizon and tiny, diamondlike lights in that direction, geometric shapes. He could see them only because his temporarily enhanced vision seemed to have telescopic properties. Jesse identified the oasis and the diamond-shaped plantings, the pillbox water silos, as well as the wedge-shaped main building of Dr. Haynes’s research base. Green-planted dunes added a tiny fringe of color before they faded into the endless brown of the desert.

Jesse began to walk across the sand. The desert made distances deceptive, but he had no doubt he would accomplish the trek, no matter how long it took. Even in the brutal heat of midday, he doubted he would need to slow down.

Behind him, his footprints began in the middle of a field of fresh spice and extended in a line, following him straight to the sanctuary of the forward base. The spice had given him new life.

31

There are intriguing puzzles all around us. Why waste time solving the wrong ones?

—DR. BRYCE HAYNES,
Ecological Notebooks

A
ided by the metabolism-enhancing properties of the intense melange to which he’d been exposed, Jesse was already recovered by the time he reached Dr. Haynes’s base. Despite a long, grueling trek, he felt strong, and most of his superficial injuries had disappeared. Giddy, he joked with Gurney that he had inhaled an Emperor’s ransom of spice with every breath he took in the subterranean realm.

Blustering, laughing, and clapping him on the back with the force of a crashing cargo skiff, the jongleur said, “If it kept you alive, laddie, it was worth more than that!”

Stunned sandminers milled around the research base, still in turmoil from the disaster. Thirty-seven men, two spice harvesters, and one carryall had been lost.
Three days ago.
He had been underground, considered dead, for three days. His safe return was desperately needed good news.

Even though the storm had dissipated, electrostatic charges in the air still interfered with transmissions. The forward base tried to send a signal informing Carthage of Jesse’s return, but they heard only white noise in response.

Jesse brooded. “I know how distraught Dorothy and Esmar must be. Gurney, dispatch a fast flyer to carry a message—I don’t care if the weather is still unsettled.”

The spice foreman raised his uneven eyebrows. “A messenger would give us away. The Emperor won’t let you hide. Are you ready to give up the game?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore, Gurney. Especially if we have as much spice as you say. I want to end this.”

Jesse spent several hours cleaning himself and eating a meal of real food—washed down with water, since he didn’t want any of the spice beverages. Afterward, he spent time with his injured and shaken sandminers, commiserating with them over their losses and congratulating them all for winning a challenge that had seemed impossible from the very beginning. Even with the disaster, Gurney told him the harvesters had gathered enough spice to tip the scales in the final tally. “Success is close at hand, men.”