Dune (43 page)

Stars!

She stared up at them, sensing Paul’s movements as he came up beside her.
The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The
weight of the day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.
“The first moon will be up soon,” Paul said. “The pack’s ready. I’ve
planted the thumper.”

We could be lost forever in this hellplace, she thought. And no one to know.

The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the
smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.

“Smell that,” Paul said.

“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 across
there.”

“Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks,” he said.

A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It
lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Jessica studied the white-
silver of sand exposed in the light.

“I planted the thumper in the deepest part of the crevasse,” Paul said.
“Whenever I light its candle it’ll give us about thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes?”

“Before it starts calling . . . a . . . worm.”

“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 tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow . . . if we ‘re to
have a tomorrow. She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained
better than that!

Paul 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,” Paul said and he called up memory of men
walking the sand . . . both prescient memory and real memory.

“Watch how I do it,” he said. “This is how Fremen walk the sand.”

He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of
it, moved with a dragging pace.

Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw
the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand . . . like
the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step . . . drag
. . . drag . . . step . . . step . . . wait . . . drag . . . step . . .

Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no
nearer. The one behind still lowered high.

“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”

It was a drumming from the cliff behind.

“The thumper,” Paul hissed.

Its pounding continued and they found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it
in their stride.

“Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . .”

They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and
up through spilling dunes: step . . .drag . . . wait . . . step . . . Across pea
sand that rolled under their feet: drag . . . wait . . . step . . .

And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.

The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage
masked it. But it grew . . . louder and louder . . . out of the west.

“Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . ” drummed the thumper.

The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their
heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.

“Keep moving,” Paul whispered. “Don’t look back.”

A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was
a flailing avalanche of noise.

“Keep moving,” Paul repeating.
He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two 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.

They moved on and on and on . . . Muscles reached a stage of mechanical
aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning,
escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.

Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure 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.

“Lump . . . lump . . . ”

Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.

Silence!

“Faster,” Paul whispered.

She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to
tell herself that 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 Paul saw a
plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in
his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary out-?thrusting of a foot.

Resonant booming shook the sand around them.

Paul lurched sideways two steps.

“Boom! Boom!”

“Drum sand!” Jessica hissed.

Paul recovered his balance. A sweeping glance took in the sand around them,
the rock escarpment perhaps two hundred meters away.

Behind them, he heard a hissing–like the wind, like a riptide where there
was no water.

“Run!” Jessica screamed. “Paul, run!”

They ran.

Drum sound 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 worm was storm sound that grew around them.

Jessica stumbled to her knees. All she could think of was the fatigue and
the sound and the terror.

Paul dragged her up.

They ran on, hand in hand.

A thin pole jutted from the sand ahead of them. They passed it, saw another.

Jessica’s mind failed to register on the poles until they were past.

There was another–wind-?etched surface thrust up from a crack in rock.

Another.

Rock!

She felt it through her feet, the shock of unresisting 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 worm’s passage stopped.

Jessica and Paul turned, peered out onto the desert.

Where the dunes began, perhaps 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. It lifted higher, resolved into a giant, questing
mouth. It was a round, black hole with edges glistening in the moonlight.

The mouth snaked toward the narrow crack where Paul and Jessica huddled.
Cinnamon yelled in their nostrils. Moonlight flashed from crystal teeth.

Back and forth the great mouth wove.
Paul stilled his breathing.

Jessica crouched staring.

It took intense concentration of her Bene Gesserit training to put down the
primal terrors, subduing a race-?memory fear that threatened to fill her mind.

Paul 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 though some step he had 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.

Instead of frightening him, the sensation of time-?darkness forced a hyper-
acceleration of his other senses. He found himself registering every available
aspect of the thing that lifted from the sand there seeking him. Its mouth was
some eighty meters in diameter . . . crystal teeth with the curved shape of
crysknives glinting around the rim . . . the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle
aldehydes . . . acids . . .

The worm blotted out the moonlight as it brushed the rocks above them. A
shower of small stones and sand cascaded into the narrow hiding place.

Paul crowded his mother farther back.

Cinnamon!

The smell of it flooded across him.

What has the worm to do with the spice, melange? he asked himself. And he
remembered Liet-?Kynes betraying a veiled reference to some association between
worm and spice.

“Barrrroooom!”

It was like a peal of dry thunder coming from far off to their right.

Again: “Barrrroooom!”

The worm drew back onto the sand, lay there momentarily, its crystal teeth
weaving moonflashes.

“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”

Another thumper! Paul thought.

Again it sounded off to their right.

A shudder passed through the worm. It drew farther 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 farther, retreating, turning. It became a mound of
cresting sand that curved away through a saddle in the dunes.

Paul stepped out of the crack, watched the sand wave recede across the waste
toward the new thumper summons.

Jessica followed, listening: “Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . .
lump . . .”

Presently the sound stopped.

Paul found the tube into his stillsuit, sipped at the reclaimed water.

Jessica focused on his action, but her mind felt blank with fatigue and the
aftermath of terror. “Has it gone for sure?” she whispered.

“Somebody called it,” Paul said. “Fremen.”

She felt herself recovering. “It was so big!”

“Not as big as the one that got our ‘thopter.”

“Are you sure it was Fremen?”

“They used a thumper.”

“Why would they help us?”

“Maybe they weren’t helping us. Maybe they were just calling a worm.”

“Why?”

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 worm?” Jessica asked.
A breath of fear touched his mind, 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 poles–wind-?scratched
markers–made out the shadow of a narrow ledge that twisted into a crevasse high
above them.

“They mark a way up the cliff,” Paul said. He settled his shoulders into the
pack, crossed to the foot of the ledge and began the climb upward.

Jessica waited 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.

Paul 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 within the crevasse. It stretched away upward,
open to the stars at the top. His ears searched, found only sounds he could
expect–a tiny spill of sand, an insect brrr, 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 upward at starlight framed by two rock lips. Paul saw his mother
beside him as a cloudy gray movement. “If we could only risk a light,” he
whispered.

“We have other senses than eyes,” she said.

Paul 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 steps, Jessica thought. Man-?carved beyond a doubt.

She followed the shadowy movement of Paul’s progress, feeling out the steps.
Rock walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed them. The steps ended in
a slitted defile about twenty meters long, its floor level, and this opened onto
a shallow, moonlit basin.

Paul stepped out into the rim of the basin, whispered: “What a beautiful
place.”

Jessica could only stare in silent agreement from her position a step behind
him.

In spite of weariness, the irritation of recaths and nose plugs and the
confinement of the stillsuit, in spite of fear and the aching desire for rest,
this basin’s beauty filled her senses, forcing her to stop and admire it.

“Like a fairyland,” Paul whispered.

Jessica nodded.

Spreading away in front of her stretched desert growth–bushes, cacti, tiny
clumps of leaves–all trembling in the moonlight. The ringwalls were dark to her
left, moonfrosted on her right.

“This must be a Fremen place,” Paul 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 acrid 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 Paul’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 the
basin with a small, dark shadow in its talons.