Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  Then one morning he decided he would stay by the spring no longer: that day he would start once again for the glades where his people roamed. His heart grew light in his side at the thought, and he cracked several gourds at once and ate the sweet meat out of them, then playfully tossed half the shell of the last of them into the little pool that the spring made at the bottom of its rock.

  It did not sink like a stone. It floated, and spun in the downflow of water, and water splashed into the hollow of it, and stayed there.

  The wanderer stared at this for a long time.

  He got up, went to the nearby tree, plucked down another gourd—though he was not hungry—and took it back to the spring and sat down. He cracked it open on a handy stone and tossed half the gourd into the pool.

  It floated. Water splashed into it, and rolled about in bright beads, and did not float away.

  The wanderer picked up the gourd carefully from the surface of the water. The beads and drops of water rolled about in the curve of the gourd, but did not spill.

  He tipped the gourd clumsily up to his lips, and the water ran out, and he drank it. His face was wet by the water running out.

  He dipped the gourd again in the pool, and this time stood up, and took a few steps with the gourd half full. The water sloshed a little, but stayed in the gourd. He drank again, more sloppily this time.

  He dipped the gourd, and rose, and walked, and drank again, and was refreshed.

  Then he dipped the gourd one more time, in jubilation, and tipped it over his head. Even then. Vulcans did not laugh…but it was as close as they were to come for some millennia.

  The wanderer did not leave that spring for some days, and when he did, with a gourd cracked only slightly at the top, he did so nervously. What if the water should not stay? What if there was something special about the gourds in this part of the world, or the springs? But the next morning he found that the next spring along worked just as well; water was water. And as he made his way back into the parts of the world he knew, he found that some gourds worked better for carrying water than others: they were lighter, or bigger. He went his way in delight, heading home, well pleased with himself and the Other, whose doing this surely must be.

  The people he was looking for, as usual, had not wandered far. They saw him coming with gladness but without much surprise: he always came back. And they saw him carrying fruit, but, rather to their surprise, it was a fruit they all knew well. They were much more surprised when they found that its insides were not the same as they usually were. They thought it was some new kind of fruit after all.

  He tried to explain it to them. The images in his mind failed him again. He tried to show them the great tree of stone, how far away it was, how high; he tried to show them the desert of gravel and stone, the flat greenness, the torrents of rain and the thunder, so unlike their placid rainstorms: he tried to show them T’Khut in her soundless splendor, looming over the world. Only now and then did he succeed. Or the image came across, but not the wonder he had felt at the sight, the awe, the terror. He could not make them understand. Particularly about the mountain, he could not make them understand, and this wounded him deep in a way he could not have explained to any of them. There had to be a way to make them understand. Therehad to be.

  The gourd they understood well enough, though not the need for it. Why should anyone want to store water? There was always enough. Why should anyone want to carry water? It was heavy, and besides, when there was plenty to be had from the streams or springs, or from the very trees, what was the point? They played with the gourd like a toy, and this wounded the wanderer too. Finally he stopped trying to tell them things, or explain things to them, and began preparing for his greater journey.

  He gathered together many gourds and cracked them in the way he had discovered, and then tried carrying them. This worked, but he could not carry many, and when even the empty gourds tired him, he thought what they would be like when they were full. No, there had to be another way. He sat down as he had sat down by the pool and looked at himself. Two arms, two legs. The legs were no good for carrying anything. He looked around him for anything that looked like more arms; and then it occurred to him that one of the thin vines had leaves lobed like hands. He pulled down every vine he could find, until his people wondered whether he had lost his senses. Perhaps he had, but six days later he had invented the net bag, and woven it big enough to carry five or six of the biggest gourds.

  He practiced with them full of water, and discovered that it made a great deal of difference how he packed them: they leaked exuberantly. He thought then that it would be even better if he could get the gourds to be whole and uncracked after he had cracked them and filled them with water, so he sat and thought about that for a few days, but not even a Vulcan could do anything aboutthat problem. Some days later he invented the stopper—a thick chunk of moss and earth from one of the streams, forced into each gourd’s opening.

  And then there was nothing to do but go back to the desert, and cross it.

  His people watched him go, again, without surprise. He knew they were thinking that sooner or later, he would be back; or not. He had an odd, hollow feeling inside him, as he left, that even now, after he had spent so much hard work getting ready for his great journey, that not one of them would come with him. He did not know what to do with the feeling. Then as now, emotion was an ambivalent matter for Vulcans. He set off, and put thoughts of his people behind him.

  The wanderer had little trouble retracing his steps. It took him a long time—especially as he did the later parts of his journey burdened down with water and the lightest of the fruits that could be eaten as food—but finally he stood again at the edge of the world, looking at the great height of stone and snow that reared up against the sky, far away. There had been some additions to his gear while he traveled. The light, for example, that hurt his eyes so: he had found a solution of sorts to that problem. He had tried covering his eyes, first, but that interfered with his ability to carry one or more of the net bags. He invented a shoulder sling for the bags, out of some spare vine, but covering his eyes still did little good against the merciless glare of Vulcan’s white primary. Then he thought of how the leaves of the trees shaded the ground, in the forested parts of the world, and so he went back to the sparse edge of the forest and plucked leaves to make shade for himself. With leaves bound about his eyes, and others tied tight about his head and wetted—for he had learned about sun-stroke, now—he went on again, much more at his ease. He came to the border with the desert and looked upon Mount Seleya in great awe and desire: and this time he did not stop. He went on.

  The sand took its toll of him. The brief encounter with it on his last journey had not prepared him for the ferocity with which it took the sun’s heat and radiated it back, and after a very short time he was staggering, half-blinded despite his cobbled-together eyeshades. One day he walked, and another, and another, and the mountain grew no closer. He refused to drink for almost a week, determined to reach the mountain no matter what happened. After another day he realized that it was wiser to walk by night and to try to hide and rest by day; and so he did, with T’Khut’s coppery light glinting on the snows of Seleya for his only guide. His walking, with no other thought touching his own, and no other sight of anything, Vulcan or beast, slowly became an exercise in sensory deprivation. He heard strange sounds and saw movements on the sand which proved to have been no movements at all when he came where he judged them to have been. He felt light-headed and detached from himself; not knowing exhaustion when he felt it, he kept going, and when he fell in his walking, he lay there, at the bottom of dune or sheltered hollow, until he felt like getting up again. He responded affably enough to the sounds he heard, though none of them responded to him. And in the evenings, he got up and walked again: a lonely, dirt-caked, mat-haired, sand-scraped creature, with leaves tied about its head, parched, confused, but determined.

  And then he heard the voice.

  It was l
ike enough to things he had been imagining lately that at first he paid it no heed. The wanderer had over the past days learned the difference between hallucination and the mind-touch of his people; he was surprised, for he had not thought at first that it was possible to experience anything that was not real. Now he had found that some realities seemed to be more persistent than others—than this new kind, which fled away before he had a chance to touch them. He had become practically resigned about it. When the voice spoke to him, therefore, he stopped, listened, and waited a little to see if it would repeat itself. When it did not, he went on, toward the faint glimmer of the mountain in the night.

  Then the sand moved under his feet, and the wanderer sat down, rather suddenly, and wondered whether something real was going to happen after all.

  It was not precisely a movement in the sand, but a vibration, very deep: it felt as if the sand, and the stone beneath it, and the solid world itself, were breathing. The wanderer considered this for a moment. People like himself breathed: might not the world be a person, simply made very large and strange? Might it not have trees for hair, and stones for bones, and sand for skin? If these things were true, then there would be nothing particularly strange about it having a voice. Perhaps it did. The Other knew.

  The voice spoke again, and the wanderer spoke to it in turn. Not in words, of course; there were no words yet. But he made a sort of sound that he meant to mean “I am here.” The sound was not entirely without emotion. The wanderer had never made it a habit to talk to the world itself, and he was interested, but nervous.

  And the sand began to stir, and sing, and rumble, and slide away from itself; and in a tremendous hissing and rush of sand, a hissing like the parting of waters by wind, the owner of the voice came up from the depths and looked on the wanderer.

  Even now, when Vulcan has been mapped millimeter by millimeter, and satellites can see any grain of sand on the planet that they wish to, very little is known about the movements and nature of the intelligences of the deep sand.A’kweth, is one of the names for them: “the hidden”; andtcha-besheh, “the underliers.” There is much speculation about their physiology, even about their evolution, for their way of life is strange in a carbon-based world: they seem not to respirate, not to need oxygen, or to feed. Some scientists think they were seeded on Vulcan by the Preservers as an experiment, the only silicon-based species (until the Hortas) to coexist on the same planet with a carbon-based one. Some point out that this stance is unsubstantiated by any data: that there is no telling what kind of feeding and respiration takes place in a creature that habitually lives under hundreds or thousands of feet of sand. No more than glimpses have ever been seen of them, through all the many centuries: a huge, broad, glittering back—but is it a back?—crusted with sand, the size of a great house; or a tentacle or two, playing with a bright stone, vanishing when surprised. Scan has proved of little use, considering the weight of natural elements usually between the creatures and the scanning equipment. Sensors turn up vast life-sign readings, a level of vitality and power that would normally belong to a thousand creatures: but movement readings rarely pinpoint more than one source of motion, sliding leisurely through the deep sand of the greater deserts, skirting the outcroppings of mountains as a cruising whale might skirt islands or shoals. Sometimes a tracked vital sign disappears completely, without explanation, without trace.

  There is little agreement about the Underliers. Some have likened them to the Vulcan equivalent of dinosaurs…but dinosaurs that never became extinct, content to live their long, strange lives in remoteness and silence, only occasionally having anything to do with the busy, hungry hominid species that came to spread across their planet. In silence they go their own ways, and what thoughts they think about the planet above them, in our day, they do not share.

  What the wanderer saw was literally too large for him to comprehend. He had desired mountains: now one had come to him. Glittering under T’Khut, it reared up, and he was regarded. He sat there on the sand and endured the regard. He was not afraid, but again that slightly nervous feeling came over him, that there were some things that the Other had somehow neglected to make known. This one in particular the wanderer would have been glad to know about in advance.

  Thea’kweth spoke again. The sound was not one that the wanderer could repeat, and barely one he could hear. If the world spoke, from stone rumbling against stone, it would sound so. And again it spoke, and the wanderer sat astonished, not knowing what to do.

  Then it was in his mind, and it spoke again, the same word, stone on stone: and he saw an image, a picture of a poor bedraggled creature, all sweat and dust, sitting on the sand with a bundle of gourds in a net. It spoke again, and gave him the image again, with terrible clarity and ease.

  And he understood. The sound it made,meant the picture.

  The wanderer would have sat down hard, had he not already been sitting. This was it: this was what he had been looking for; the answer, the way to tell people about the mountain. If everyone was using the same sound for a given picture, then everyone would understand. All that needed to be done was to make the sounds, the words.

  He did it, right then. He did his best to make a picture of the creature inside him; difficult enough it was, for the thing filled the whole world. And he made a sound, the first sound he could think of, a sort of clicking grunt; and then the picture again, and the sound to follow it.

  Thea’kweth reared up higher yet, higher than the mountain, till it leaned over the wanderer and filled the sky; and it roared a long singing roar like the wind in the trees during a hard rain. The flood of images that blasted through the wanderer made him clutch his head, so strange they were; lives and deaths were in them, and terrible heat and pressure, and odd desires and triumphs, but above all darkness, a sweet, enclosing, down-pressing darkness that made this mere night look like white day by comparison—a barren, exposed, inhospitable thing. The roar dwindled to a mutter, to a breath, to a hiss; the sand slipped aside, booming underneath the wanderer; and smoothed itself over, and was silent again, and still. Thea’kweth had gone.

  For a long time the wanderer sat there, gazing across the cooling sand at the mountain. Ruddy and warm the light of T’Khut shone on the snows of the peak, and it actually looked a little closer, for the first time. He wished it had not, for now the choice was before him. To go back to his people and give them this gift? To go ahead to the mountain and bring them the news of it first?

  But he might not come back from the mountain. And the gift would be lost. For who but he had ever come here, or ever would?

  Two days he sat there, ignoring the sun: two nights, ignoring the stars and the silence, his eyes on the mountain.

  On the third day he rose and turned back toward the forests.

  The word spread slowly, but there was no stopping it, as usual: the word once spoken always finds its way where it is going.

  The Wanderer was his name, now. He had made a word, and taught it to them. His group drifted still about the forests, eating, needing nothing, but now they spoke to one another. They had all taken names, and hard on the heels of their own names had come names for other things; and then words for ways of doing and going; and then some of them started stringing the words together and making sentences out of them. Shortly after that, someone else invented song. The forests became full of music, and words rang out. More people came into his group: and some went away and came back bringing others; there were visits, and meetings and partings, and many people not of the Wanderer’s group now knew about words, and used some of his, and made some of their own.

  The Wanderer made new words for everything. He had brought the first one: his people seemed to think he should make all the rest, and so he did. But he kept coming back to the first word he had made for them, which he thought was his best.Heya, it was: an outward breath of surprise, a cry of delight, on seeing something wonderful—and to go with the word, the image of the mountain as he had first seen it, all green forest and
white fire, immensely distant, wonderfully great and tall. The image seemed easier to make and clearer, since the huge thing had been in his head. Indeed all the Wanderer’s images did. But that was the one he kept thinking of, while they brought him fruits and beasts and tools to name. He thought often of the sand out in the desert, and the great voice; and often he wished he had paid no attention to it, and kept on walking. But then he would remember the size of the creature that had owned the voice in the sand, and he would sigh. It is hard to make the world go away when it has decided to notice you.

  It was a fine day in the shade of the trees, one that seemed brighter than usual, so that it reminded the Wanderer of the lessened shade beneath the trees nearer the desert. He put aside the fruit he was trying to think of a name for and began instead to make a song, which was an invention of another of his group, a she too young for Rapture yet. To make a song, you said the words you liked, one after another, and made a noise with them too; and the Wanderer was pleased by this art, since he had been good at making noises since before his own first Rapture, long long ago.

  So now he sat and leaned his back against the great tree which was his favorite and made his song; and it was this, that the world was good, and the light was bright, and there were good things to eat, and the Other knew all this and had intended it so. A couple of others of his group, hearing the song, thought it was good too, and took it up themselves: and it spread from one person to another, to those eating, and those lying still under trees, and those wrestling and playing, and those drinking: and those asleep stirred in that sleep, and some of them muttered words, though what they were could not be heard. All this seemed good to the Wanderer, and he sang, under his tree, for a long time.

  He paused, after a while, because he smelled something strange. It was an odd smell; he had never smelled its like except near places in the forest where something had happened to a tree to leave it blackened and broken and shriveled. The Wanderer looked up into the bright day—indeed it was much brighter than usual: were the trees bending apart to let in more light, as they did when the wind blew? But there was no wind. Well, no matter. The Wanderer thought he ought to make a name for that smell. He breathed deeper.