“May I suggest an alternative, General?” Victor Fremdkunst said.
“Go ahead.”
“Since we’re going to be mooring anyway, why don’t we put down where that anomaly is tracking?”
“Good idea. Where is it now?”
“It’s altered course. I’ll patch it through to Captain McGuire.”
McGuire gave a startled look.
“Problems, McGuire?”
“That ‘anomaly’ seems to be headed toward the area where the pursuit helicopters went down.”
“Hmm!” Retticker said. “Maybe not such a good idea, Victor.”
“A calculated risk, General, but I think one worth taking. I’ve already contacted George Otis’s people for backup support, should we need it.”
Retticker pondered it. He’d be damned if he’d let Otis get his fingers into all this before he had a chance to thoroughly investigate it. Still, Fremdkunst had a point. He supposed he owed Victor something, for forcing him to leave a big clutch of his beloved sky rocks behind.
“I agree. Mister McGuire, put us down near where those pursuit helos went down. A good deal more gently than they landed, if you don’t mind. Take it nice and slow on the way there, too.”
TORTURED MUSIC
Ankawi had said not to worry, Avram thought. That they had plenty of time, plenty of water, plenty of food, plenty of spare parts, and plenty of GPS. That, by the time they finished this mad trip, Avram would be able to easily pass for a surly old man of the desert.
At least Mahmoud was right about the last part. This trip had aged them both. No denying that.
Water holes in the deep desert had turned out to be polluted oil wastes, or dotted with camel dung, or tasting of Epsom salts. Sandstorms blew grit and dust into eyes, nose, mouth, ears—every unprotected orifice or uncovered cranny—at seventy miles an hour, until he felt as if they were living inside a wind tunnel chaffed with sandpaper. Increasing frequency of breakdowns of the ATVs followed each sandblast battering, made worse by the slow learning curves of himself and Mahmoud as mechanics.
Their food supply was running low, except for the endless dried dates. Sleep deprivation that not even the nocturnal regimen of coffee could quite overcome brought on the yawning jitters night after night as they drove on, increasingly hungry and thirsty. Their eyes had grown weary from seeing too much sand and too many stars, above a desert not cut by so much as an empty road since they crossed the highway running between As Sulaymaniyah and As Sulayyil, south of the town of Layla.
Even the GPS was functioning more sporadically, as it and its solar battery had more and more trouble talking to each other. Which meant they had to spend more time course-correcting, which meant they fell further behind schedule each night.
All of it wore on him. He barely noticed anymore the spectacular beauty of the infrequent rock outcroppings in dawn light—the pink and purple sandstones, the bloodred ironstone, the black basalts.
Even Mahmoud was not as talkative as before.
They’d camped this dawn by a briny water hole at the bottom of an amphitheater of high dunes with steep slipfaces. They were just waking from their sporadic morning naps in the chameleon tent when two helicopters battered the air overhead—barely clearing the high dunes in their frenzied push eastward, and leaving Avram ready to lose his grip on sanity altogether.
“They ought to rename this place the Not-So-Empty Quarter,” he muttered, as what sounded like the drone of a turboprop plane continued to fill the horseshoe of dunes where they were encamped. “Sounds like that guy in the plane is circling right in on us!”
“Those were helicopters that went over,” Mahmoud said suddenly, putting on his boots. “Not a plane.
That’s not a plane we’re hearing.”
He got up, opened the tent flap, and stepped outside.
“Mahmoud, what are you doing? It’s broad day! Do you want them to spot us?”
“There’s no one out here. That drone is from the dunes! These are singing sands! I’ve been fascinated with them since I was little!”
Convinced that Mahmoud had finally cracked, Avram put on his boots and stepped out into the heat of the climbing sun. Scanning the sky, he saw it was true. Despite the deep rhythmic droning all around them, there were in fact no aircraft to be seen.
“The Bedu once believed the singing, booming, or barking of the sands was caused by djinns,” Mahmoud said, walking toward the nearest dune and beginning to climb it. “Actually, it’s sand slides. On high dunes with steep, metastable or quasi-stable slipfaces—like these around us.”
Avram walked toward Mahmoud, noticing that his partner’s trek up the nearest dune had begun to add new pitches and tones to the droning sound. He saw Mahmoud bend down and take up a handful of the sand.
“Well-sorted, medium-size grains,” Mahmoud said, examining the stuff in his hand. “Highly polished, too.
Blown a good distance by the wind, probably season after season, for generations.”
He stood up, letting the sand gradually drizzle out between his fingers.
“Take a big enough mound of this kind of sand, with a steep enough slipface for sand slides to really get moving down it. Then, when you disturb it, it can emit a lot of acoustical energy. Those helicopters going over, loud and low like that, triggered the sand slides—and this sound.”
As Avram climbed up the dune toward him, he stopped. Beneath his feet he felt an unmistakable throbbing and pulsing below the sand’s surface, as if the dead desert were alive in a way he had never imagined.
“Feels like a weak earthquake,” he called to Mahmoud, who nodded.
“Seismic signals, probably broadband output up to twenty hertz, maybe other tones in the fifty-to-eighty range. Those are the most common. It can make other sounds, too, I’ll bet.”
With that, Mahmoud began to leap and run about like a madman in the blistering sun, up and down and across the dune face, stopping and kicking the sand vigorously at various points. Soon Avram heard an entire orchestra of sounds: roars and booms and squeaks, sirens and zithers, kettledrums and harpsichords.
Avram ran in the opposite direction and, from a distance, joined Mahmoud in playing the landscape, running and kicking and laughing and rolling down the dunes, like men driven insane by the heat.
A sweet madness, he thought as he tired. Much sweeter than the madness of their night-journeying, toward the greater madness of a greater world. Toward a madness, perhaps, that would torment a worldscape, torture from it a terrible music of vengeance beyond imagining.
Finally, too hot and dirty and tired to continue, he plunked himself down beside Mahmoud atop the tallest dune and watched the sun scream toward noon.
“What do you think those helicopters were about?”
“As long as they’re not about us,” Mahmoud said, “they’re not our concern. What’s behind us is not what we need to worry about.”
The sun was too close to zenith for them to endure any more. Only mad dogs and Englishmen, as the old saying went. They turned without a word and walked back down to their camp, the sand booming softly beneath their boots.
NINE
MIRACLES AND WONDERS
When Michael Miskulin regained consciousness, he knew from the pain that he was in a bad way.
Opening his eyes and gingerly turning his head, he saw, scattered on the burning sands before his face, thin slices of shining metal like coins of an alien treasury. It took him a moment to realize what they were.
Meteorite samples.
The fury of the crash came back to him vaguely. He realized now that the impact had been severe enough that it had ripped open the helicopter. Amazing the thing hadn’t burst into flame, given that smash-up—though he did smell what he presumed was aviation fuel.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. The good guys weren’t supposed to make these kinds of mistakes. He was probably only still alive because he’d been wearing smart armor. Despite that protection, he wasn’t doing well, crushed an
d three quarters buried by…
Dislodged crates of meteoritic samples. Saved by his smart armor from the disaster that had spewed him out into the desert, only to die beneath broken crates of meteorite samples the crash had slammed atop him at the same time. Good Doctor Meteor felled at last by his long, incurable obsession with falling stars.
The irony of it was not only annoying but embarrassing. Their pursuit of those fleeing Wabar was not supposed to put all their precious lives at risk—or risk all these precious samples, either. Mistakes or no, he decided he’d rather not be slowly crushed to death this way, or incinerated when that av-gas went up.
“Susan!” he rasped out. “Darla!”
No voices came in answer, but another answer came, nonetheless.
The tonnage of broken material heaped above him began to shift off from above, to lift off, carefully, in sections. He wondered if he had gone deaf, for he heard no machinery—but no, he wasn’t deaf. He could hear the scrape and grind of the broken packaging and the clatter of the falling skystones themselves.
When the last of the heap had been removed, he found he was being carefully rolled onto his back. He stared up at the dirty faces of two children who, despite their ragamuffin looks and clothes, were still recognizably their Mawari kids—the youngest one, Ka-dalun, and the boy, Alii.
He felt searing pain as they straightened out his arms and legs. Flashing for a moment on Darla’s old worry that the kids might be after some sort of elaborate revenge for what had happened to their people, he cried out as loud as he could. They ignored him, focusing instead on cleaning his wounds with water from his canteen, removing clothing and doing general debridement on his bloody lacerations with a soldier’s field knife. They examined the deep, confused tattooing of his contusions, as well as the simple or compound fractures on his limbs and torso.
As the pain began to decrease with surprising rapidity, however, other questions sprang to his mind. How did they learn this stuff? They probably used a much higher percentage of their brains than non-myconeuralized human beings did, granted. They’d accessed the entire infosphere at Larkin’s place in Tahoe, he knew that. Hell, maybe they were still doing that somehow, even now. But all the knowledge in the world didn’t account for the fact that they seemed to be able to move aside huge piles of debris or untwist and unbend metal by simply willing it so.
Nor did knowledge alone explain how their touch was healing him, bringing him back from death’s door with a rapidity he knew was quite beyond the capacity of medical science to explain, much less achieve.
They raised him to a sitting position and brought the canteen to his lips.
“Here, Uncle Michael,” Ka-dalun said, in a voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used much lately. Alii had gone to help the other two girls with Susan and Darla, he now saw. “You should feel better now.”
Michael nodded and watched as the four children ministered to all the injured and dying. He saw the burning ruin of the Saudi troop helo and realized it had taken the brunt of the attack. How many died?
And why?
When all who could be mended were mending and had been provided with shade, the children moved on to another, and stranger, task.
He could only watch as they walked among the meteoritic fragments scattered on the sand, their hands held palms down, faraway looks in their eyes. On the sand below their hands, the fragments flipped and twisted, despite the fact that he could see nothing physically touching them. From a relative few of those bewitched stones, little fountains of what looked like strings of light or threads of sparks bent and leapt toward the palms of the children.
The children then approached the few boxes that were still more or less intact. These, too, were filled with stacked meteoritic samples—mostly carbonaceous chondrites, Michael saw from the labeling. What came out of the boxes toward the children standing before them was like a daylight fireworks display—cloud chamber traceries of particle/ antiparticle collision tracks—but one in which the whoosh, whistle, and bang were replaced by loud rustling, clinking, and rattling of what could only have been the skystones in their boxes, writhing as if possessed.
A triangular cloud-shadow, passing over a dune in the middle distance, caught the kids’ attention.
Michael saw it, too. Looking up, he thought it odd, for he saw no cloud that could make such a very regular shadow—no clouds at all, as a matter of fact.
Focusing on where he thought the shadow might be coming from, he saw a slippage in the sky, of which he became more and more certain as the shadow grew closer. After a moment he realized that it must be the shadow of the stealth craft they’d been chasing, and which had shot them down. He spotted a thin crescent line, too, like a meniscus of surface tension separating oil and water, where the desert tan of the airship’s top side was not quite completely hidden by its sky-blue underside.
The children, he saw, had gotten that faraway look in their eyes again. With a start he realized they were indeed looking far away—farther indeed than eyes could look.
Out of the sand, like a scuba diver breaking the surface of a calm sea, came a thing of sand and stone in the roughed-in shape of a man. The brecciated man rose completely out of the sand sea and strode upon its surface, a sphinx out for a stroll in the desert. This sphinx, however, picked up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher one of the troops had been carrying.
Glancing at the children, the stoneman nodded and took aim at a particular location on the stealth airship, now quite close. Down from the airship flew a brace of missiles, exploding to either side of the stoneman.
He ignored them and fired at the slowly turning craft. A small mushroom of orange fire mottled with black smoke burst on the sky-blue underside of the airship. Almost immediately the airship began to roll, and pitch up, and yaw away from them.
Michael wondered if he were really seeing all this, or if it might just be some strange sort of near-death experience, with other people’s lives passing before his eyes.
SWIMRUN, CLIMBFLY
After the airship spun away, the Mawari girls Aubrey and Ebu took Darla by the hands and led her toward where the stoneman stood.
We have to leave now, the girls thought into her head. Immediately.
“But what about about Susan and Michael?” Darla asked aloud, uncomfortable with the idea of beaming thoughts into someone else’s brain. “What about Ka-dalun and Alii?”
Their way lies along a different path from ours. From yours and Major Vasques’s, too.
Darla felt the sand softening below her as they sank into it.
“But why?”
Because you and the major are most like us. In all the world. Relax now. We’ll teach you how to move.
Fighting off the sensation of drowning as the sand closed over her head, Darla found she could still breathe—once she forced herself to do so. The sensation was both profoundly strange and oddly familiar.
Like when she’d learned to scuba dive in Hawaii, years before. Her diving instructor had his students remove their masks and put their faces in the water, while at the same time continuing to breathe through regulators from their air tanks. It took awhile, but Darla and nearly all her fellow students at last learned to keep breathing, despite their bodies’ reflexive resistance to breathing while their faces were unmasked and underwater.
Beneath the sand, of course, the visibility was worse—far more limited—and the experience more claustrophobic than even her worst day of scuba diving during an algal bloom off southern California.
Moving through the sand (which was cooler with depth) felt odd, too. Soon, however, she felt the girls’ hands helping her, guiding her, teaching her how to fall and catch herself from falling as she strode forward.
It was like learning how to walk all over again. It was also, she imagined, rather like being a satellite in orbit, forever falling toward its planet but never reaching it, falling and being caught from falling, until “toward” transformed to “around.”
As sh
e moved with the girls and the stone major, she realized that she could swimrun and climbfly remarkably fast this way—far faster than she had ever run on earth, or swum underwater, or rappelled down a rock face. The strangeness of it gave way to pure exhilaration. Darla felt her face breaking into the kind of smile she hadn’t felt since the second time she rode a roller coaster.
A PARTING OF WAYS
The stealth airship’s crash into a sebkha silt-flat was not nearly as catastrophic as what the downed helicopter had suffered, but it was bad enough. As Joe Retticker and his crew got out and surveyed the damage, it soon became clear that the airship was going to be grounded for a while.
The sound and then sight of not one but two helicopters, coming in low over the dunes, set the crew and his fellow passengers to jumping up and down or at least waving with considerable enthusiasm. As the helicopters turned and then began to settle toward the ground, he saw the tires swivel downward and inflate into doughnut-shaped pontoons, so that they settled onto, rather than into, the sebkha.
He was wondering at the expense of such a cutting-edge modification when doors in both helicopters slid forward and Military Executive Resource Corp troops stormed out. In their wake their commander came striding toward him. Despite the man’s smart armor, Retticker quickly recognized him as George Otis himself.
“Hello, Joe,” Otis said, smiling. “Looks like you’ve run into a little trouble.”
“A bit.”
“Your GPS locator beacon must have gotten damaged in the crash,” Otis said. “Lucky thing we were tracking you when you went down. We’re here to help.”
McGuire gave Retticker a sidewise glance at the mention of the GPS being out, then shrugged. Otis, meanwhile, signaled to two squads of his troops. The first MERC unit cut Fremdkunst, Michelson, and Levitch away from them, leaving Joe Retticker standing beside Yuri Semenov and the crew of the airship.
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