Cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised on a brink of self- awareness that could not have been without the litany’s magic.
Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory:
“There’s rock all around,” Jessica said.
Paul focused on the ’thopter’s launching, shook his head to clear it. He looked where his mother pointed, saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm’s doing.
“Better set us down on sand,” Jessica said. “The wings might not take full brake.”
He nodded toward a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes. “I’ll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness.”
She obeyed, thinking:
“Run for those rocks the instant we’re stopped,” Paul said. “I’ll take the pack.”
“Run for….” She fell silent, nodded. “Worms.”
“Our friends, the worms,” he corrected her. “They’ll get this ’thopter. There’ll be no evidence of where we landed.”
They glided lower… lower …
There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage—blurred shadows of dunes, rocks lifting like islands. The ’thopter touched a dune top with a soft lurch, skipped a sand valley, touched another dune.
“Brace yourself!” Paul warned.
He pulled back on the wing brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. He felt them cup the air, their aspect ratio dropping faster and faster. Wind screamed through the lapped coverts and primaries of the wings’ leaves.
Abruptly, with only the faintest lurch of warning, the left wing, weakened by the storm, twisted upward and in, slamming across the side of the ’thopter. The craft skidded across a dune top, twisting to the left. It tumbled down the opposite face to bury its nose in the next dune amid a cascade of sand. They lay stopped on the broken wing side, the right wing pointing toward the stars.
Paul jerked off his safety harness, hurled himself upward across his mother, wrenching the door open. Sand poured around them into the cabin, bringing a dry smell of burned flint. He grabbed the pack from the rear, saw that his mother was free of her harness. She stepped up onto the side of the right-hand seat and out onto the ’thopter’s metal skin. Paul followed, dragging the pack by its straps.
“Run!” he ordered.
He pointed up the dune face and beyond it where they could see a rock tower undercut by sandblast winds.
Jessica leaped off the ’thopter and ran, scrambling and sliding up the dune. She heard Paul’s panting progress behind. They came out onto a sand ridge that curved away toward the rocks.
“Follow the ridge,” Paul ordered. “It’ll be faster.”
They slogged toward the rocks, sand gripping their feet.
A new sound began to impress itself on them: a muted whisper, a hissing, an abrasive slithering.
“Worm,” Paul said.
It grew louder.
“Faster!” Paul gasped.
The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten meters ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them.
Paul shifted his pack to his right arm, holding it by the straps. It slapped his side as he ran. He took his mother’s arm with his other hand. They scrambled onto the lifting rock, up a pebble-littered surface through a twisted, wind-carved channel. Breath came dry and gasping in their throats.
“I can’t run any farther,” Jessica panted.
Paul stopped, pressed her into a gut of rock, turned and looked down onto the desert. A mound-in-motion ran parallel to their rock island—moonlit ripples, sand waves, a cresting burrow almost level with Paul’s eyes at a distance of about a kilometer. The flattened dunes of its track curved once—a short loop crossing the patch of desert where they had abandoned their wrecked ornithopter.
Where the worm had been there was no sign of the aircraft.
The burrow mound moved outward into the desert, coursed back across its own path, questing.
“It’s bigger than a Guild spaceship,” Paul whispered. “I was told worms grew large in the deep desert, but I didn’t realize … how big.”
“Nor I,” Jessica breathed.
Again, the thing turned out away from the rocks, sped now with a curbing track toward the horizon. They listened until the sound of its passage was lost in gentle sand stirrings around them.
Paul took a deep breath, looked up at the moon-frosted escarpment, and quoted from the Kitab al-Ibar: “Travel by night and rest in black shade through the day.” He looked at his mother. “We still have a few hours of night. Can you go on?”
“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.
“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.
