Road to Dune (12 page)

These plants were victims of an untenable situation, trapped in a place where they did not belong.
Like House Linkam,
she thought,
barely surviving on this barren world, hoping our lives will be returned to us
.

Feeling gloom wash through her, Dorothy placed the tray on a plaz table and brushed dirt and dead insects off a chair before sitting down. She poured the rich, aromatic tea into her cup, and steam escaped into the air.
Lost moisture
. As she lifted the cup to her lips, a rush of cinnamon tickled her nostrils.

Only she and Jesse knew this place existed, and only the two of them knew that the plants would soon all be dead. She could be completely alone here, undisturbed with her thoughts, though she doubted she would find any solutions. Dorothy finished the spice tea, and as melange seeped into her body, her mind’s eye projected vivid images of watery, dreamlike Catalan. If only she and her family could be back there again … .

But mere wishes could not transport them home, could not erase the unfortunate events that had brought them here. Where were Jesse and Barri now? What if William English himself had remained secretly loyal to the Hoskanners? Had he dumped their lifeless bodies in the desert to shrivel like the plants around her?

Tears streamed down her cheeks. On this world, they called it “giving water to the dead.”

13

In the desert, hope is as scarce as water. Both are a mirage.

—SANDMINER’S LAMENT

E
ven after the water ran out, they kept moving. They had to. English took the lead, frequently checking his paracompass, while Jesse and Barri plodded after him. There could be no turning back now. It was a hot afternoon, with the unrelenting sun in the western sky.

They approached a low-hanging, discolored haze, and Jesse realized they had stumbled upon a patch of fumaroles. Though they had little hope of finding water there, they traveled toward the hissing steam vents. If nothing else, the chemical steam would obscure some of the painful sunlight.

When the wind picked up, English looked around in concern. He touched the waxy scar on his cheek and met Jesse’s gaze. “Weather’s changing. I feel it.”

“How soon until the storm gets here?” Jesse asked. Barri searched the horizon for the wall of dust heading their way.

“No telling,” English answered. “They’re capricious things. Could come right at us, no matter where we hide—or the weather front might turn aside and go somewhere else entirely.”

Taking shelter in partial shade among the sulfur-painted rocks near the roar of a fumarole, they sat down to rest. Jesse opened the pack and withdrew his paracompass. “I need to know how far we have left to go.” To his dismay, when he studied the coordinates, their destination seemed farther away than ever. The directional needle pointed at an extreme angle from where they’d been heading. “William, check your compass.”

The spice foreman held his device next to Jesse’s. After comparing, both men were astonished to see that the readings were entirely different. When English pushed the reset button, his needle spun until it landed at a new spot. Jesse did the same, and now the direction on his instrument pointed back the way they had come. The men looked at each other.

“More sabotage?” Jesse asked.

“No, I think it’s magnetite in the dunes,” English said, his voice thick with discouragement. “Static energy from the storm front or maybe from a sandworm. It scrambled the compasses.”

Jesse reset his device again, and now the needle spun in wild circles.

English slumped in hopeless surrender. “We weren’t going in the right direction! We have no way of knowing where the outpost is, and now we can’t even find our way back to the ornijet. Our footprints would have been erased days ago.”

Jesse was not willing to show fear in front of his son. They had been wandering in the desert, possibly going in circles. In the open expanse he could not begin to guess where anything might be—the Imperial outpost, the city of Carthage, the buried ornijet, or the forward base. They were utterly lost, and they had run out of water.

Reaching an edge of desperation, English staggered to the discolored sands near a fumarole. He stood there poised for a long moment, staring down as if in a daze. Jesse wondered if the man intended to plunge headfirst into the exhaling vapors.

“How can anything survive out here?” English finally said. “Every living thing needs water. Maybe we should have drunk the blood of those kangaroo mice.”

“I tried to catch them,” Barri said, his voice dry and raspy.

English bent closer to the crusty sands near the fumarole, as fiercely intent as a hunter. His voice dropped to a whisper. “But immense creatures live in the sands. There has to be water.” The bedraggled spice foreman slowly extended his hands, toward shapes that writhed and squirmed in the warm sands around the steam vent.

He lunged, digging his hands through the powdery crust. Like a dog, he furiously scooped sand aside, burrowing, clawing, until he finally seized something. He struggled, cried out in triumph, and lurched backward, uprooting a shapeless blob that looked like a gigantic cell as long as his forearm. English tossed the thing onto the hard-packed sand, then dropped to his knees and flipped it over, trying to hold it down as it continued to flop.

Barri hurried forward, full of boyish curiosity, despite their ordeal. “What’s that?”

“Sandtrout. Dr. Haynes told me they’re often found near fumaroles.” English looked up at them with reddish eyes. “All I care about is that it’s alive, and there’s some sort of liquid inside—blood, sap, protoplasm. Who knows?” He pressed his fingers into the pliable skin of the squirming thing, then drew a utility knife from his pack.

“Can we survive on it?” Jesse asked.

The spice foreman pulled his face mask aside and shrugged. “I’ve never heard of anyone eating a sandtrout. As far as I know, nobody’s had to.”

“What if it’s poison?” Barri asked.

“Seems to me, young Master, that we’re as good as dead anyway if we don’t get some water soon.” He tried to swallow, but could find no moisture in his dry throat. “I’m going to take a chance. One of us has to.”

Jesse lowered his voice. “Thank you for not giving up, William.”

With his fingers, English jabbed the sandtrout’s leathery membrane, then broke through with the tip of the knife. Thick liquid oozed out like viscous saliva, and a potent aroma wafted up, a tang of harsh alkaline mixed with cinnamon so strong that it stung their eyes. “It smells like spice beer.” English dipped his finger and touched it to his tongue. “Tastes like spice, too … extremely potent stuff. But different.” Surrendering caution, desperately thirsty, he lowered his mouth to the stillsquirming sandtrout. With his eyes closed, he took a long slurp of the slimy fluid.

Jesse had wanted English to take just a small taste, to wait and see if there might be adverse effects … but considering their complete lack of supplies, his warning would have meant nothing.

Barri moved forward, looking thirstily at the sandtrout and the slick fluid oozing from it.

Suddenly English sat ramrod straight and dropped the protoplasmic creature to the packed ground. “It burns! But it sparkles like a thousand tiny explosions in my mouth.” He touched his sternum. “In my chest, moving its way down!” He drew a long, gasping breath and stretched his arms out to both sides, straining as if he meant to pull his own fingers out of their sockets.

“I can feel it all the way to my fingertips! Like land mines exploding energy to every one of my cells.” He lunged to his feet and shuddered, then stared into a sky that was already growing restless from the oncoming storm. “This is the spice, the heart of Duneworld! I can feel the sandworms.”

Jesse reached out to grab the man’s arms. “William, take deep breaths. Control yourself. You’re having an adverse—”

Eyes wild, the spice foreman turned in a slow circle. “I can sense everything beneath us, and all around. The spice, the worms, sand plankton, and … more. Wonders we have never seen or imagined. Ah!”

English struck Jesse, knocking him away, and dropped back to his knees. Like a madman, English grabbed the sandtrout carcass, plunged his face into the viscous moistness, slurped up more of the fluid, and began to laugh. When his eyes settled on Barri, he rushed over to the boy, yelling. “
I’m alive!
I can see the future and the past. But which is which?”

Jesse pushed him away, standing between the wild man and his son. “Stay away. William—”

“I can sail through the dunes, dive under them, tunnel deeper. Must protect the spice, the spores …”

He grabbed Jesse by the chest and leaned toward him, frantic. Blood leaked from his gums, staining his teeth. “Too much spice … but never enough spice. Must protect the spice! The sandworms. I
am
a sandworm!”

Hemorrhages blossomed in the whites of the scarred man’s eyes. Within seconds, English began weeping blood. Still raving, he touched his eyes, looked at his scarlet-stained fingertips. “The spice! The spice! It has us all trapped. We’ll never break free.”

“Father, what’s happening to him?” Barri cried. “We’ve got to help!”

“There’s no way to do that,” Jesse said. “He’s had too much spice, an overdose.”

English bolted into the steamy field of fumaroles. “Find the spice! Become one with the spice, one with the sandworms!” Screaming, he ran headlong—until the ground dropped from beneath him. The swirling mouth of a sand whirlpool.

“William!” Jesse rushed forward, but stopped himself, realizing the danger of the treacherous ground. “William!”

As the sand spun and sucked him down, English cried out with laughter and howled in delight. He seemed to
want
to be drawn underground—and the sand whirlpool obliged him.

Barri started toward the foreman, but Jesse held him back. English’s upraised, slime-slick hands vanished, leaving only the faint stirrings of the top powdery layer.

“He’s gone forever,” Barri said.

Jesse sank down next to his son. “Now it’s just the two of us.”

After a long moment, Barri straightened his shoulders and clasped his father’s hand. His voice was very small. “Just the two of us.”

14

He is one with the sand.

—DUNEWORLD FUNERAL LITANY

T
hough she refused to accept defeat, Dorothy had performed her own calculations and projected the supplies that might have been aboard the ornijet, extrapolating how long anyone could have survived.

Search party after search party returned without success. In a desert as large as a planet, a human being was no more significant than a grain of sand. Like a voracious predator, the endless wasteland had swallowed Jesse, Barri, and English.

In the convict-worker barracks in Carthage and the freedmen section of town, Gurney Halleck had tried to encourage the men, to maintain their morale. She admired his efforts, the way he sang inspiring songs, but lately the verses he had repeated for her sounded increasingly tragic.

Freedmen sandminers, pulled from their work to continue the hopeless search, were beginning to grumble about lost bonuses. Dorothy couldn’t blame them; for such men, bonuses were their only hope of earning passage off of Duneworld. The convict laborers did not want to be taken from the spice harvesters, either, fearing they would be sent back to even worse penal worlds such as Salusa or Eridanus V. And nobody looked forward to having the Hoskanners return … .

“Their ornijet could have crashed in the storm,” General Tuek said, as he met with her in her office on the third level of the headquarters mansion. He stood with his hands on the back of a chair. “But it could just as easily have been sabotage. Anyone who knew the nobleman was out at the forward base could have laid a trap for him when he returned.”

“Many people knew of the expedition, General.” She stood near the window, with her arms folded across her chest. Something about this man always grated on her.

“You knew about it, madam. Any observer on the landing field could feel the friction between you and the nobleman as he left. What exactly was the nature of your disagreement?”

Red anger flashed through her eyes, burning through her grief and hopelessness. “Any personal discussions between Jesse and myself are exactly that—personal! How dare you even imply that I might have had something to do with their disappearance.”

“It is my duty as security chief to suspect everyone, especially those who might benefit. You are the legal proxy for House Linkam. In my opinion, the nobleman has given a commoner altogether too much control over his finances and business.”

Dorothy was so disoriented by the accusation that it took her a moment to grasp onto a thread of logic. “Leaving aside the fact that Barri is my own son—” She drew a breath, forced ice into her words. “If House Linkam is dissolved, then I would lose everything. I would be a fool to place Jesse’s life at risk.”

“You are no fool, madam. In fact, you would be smart enough to divert a great amount of Linkam wealth into secret accounts of your own.” The veteran’s red-stained lips were set in a grim line, showing no compassion.

She placed her hands on her hips so that she wouldn’t try to throttle him. “That is quite enough, General—especially from a man who has implied he believes we should give up the search.”

“I made no such suggestion.” He stiffened defensively, stood at attention, with his arms at his sides. “I have served House Linkam for far longer than you have known Jesse, madam. I have already seen two noblemen die. If we abandon the search, then House Linkam dies and the Hoskanners have already won.” His red-stained lips twitched. “However, if we cease all spice production, then that is also true. I merely implied that we should consider sending some of the teams back to work. Each day, we lose more ground against the Hoskanners.”