Jak Edge looked away from Garoit. "He can term me family, chup. He can turn 'em out on the sand 'till they die of thirst."
Garoit studied Edge for a moment, stood, and called out the name of one of his followers from the Freedom Front. "Emil?"
A voice from the dark answered, "Listening."
"Herd these sheets together with our bunch." He pointed at Ondo Suth. "Leave me that one."
"Understood."
As Emil got them to their feet, the one called Edge said to Ondo, "Mind me words, Suth. There's some that you don't want out on the march yourself. Hear me?"
After the prisoners were gone, Garoit sat next to Ondo facing the burning blue. "Who's this boss?"
"Kegel. Boss Kegel. He'd put his own mother on the march, if he had a mother."
"March?"
"Nowt complicated, chup. He faces you toward the sand and says 'march.' You got no food or water and no one's lasted more'n four, five days. Course everyone puts in at least two, three days of pure hell before they term. Kegel usually has a pair of watchers on you to make certain you don't double back and no one helps you. Sure and they drink water and spit it in your tracks, too. The way your leadin' this gang, you'll find out about it soon enough."
"Find out what?"
"What dyin' of thirst means, Chup. Know those mountains you're makin' for?"
"About twenty miles west? What about them?"
"They was only twenty miles west yesterday, too, nowt?"
"Say what you're going to say."
"What if I said them mountains nowt even there, chup? What then?"
"Not there? Are you saying the mountains are a mirage?"
"A couple of kinds of mirage, chup. Here's the ace. Those mountains are near two thousand miles west of where we sit tonight. The lughs can make five, six hundred miles without water, but they'll be long dead before you reach the mountains. But, no mind 'cause you'll be dead long before the beasts."
He grinned. "Here's where it gets fun, chup. See, on the deuce of it, even if you was at them mountains, they be Hell's Divide, and nothin' lives there because nothin' can live there. It's so dead there it makes this place look good."
"Those mountains are green," I protested.
"Chup, you ever hear tell of a mineral called olivine?"
"No."
"No matter. All you need to know is that it's green, them mountains is made of it, and that's all that's green on the divide. Worse'n that, from the divide it's another eight hundred or thousand miles through West Hell before, you get to any water."
It was silent around our tiny circle. I held out my hot box chow to Alna and was pleased when she took a bit. As I held it out to Garoit I asked Ondo, "Why're you telling us this?"
Ondo tore his gaze away from the food and looked at me. "I have me reasons."
"I can't trust 'em 'till I know what they are."
"Bando, you told me to become valuable, nowt?"
"Is that the only reason?"
"Bein' alive's nowt reason enough? And I be a sight more value to you than to Boss Kegel. Mebbe you can see your way clear someday to treat me that way."
Garoit pursed his lips and nodded. "We'll see."
I asked the sheet, "What if we went north? How much desert is there that way?"
Ondo laughed, "Chup, you can pick it, sure." He quieted down and leaned forward, his hands still tied behind him. He glanced at Garoit, Alna, and then at me.
"I'm lettin' you know where you be. This stuff," he nodded toward his feet, "is part of somethin' called the Forever Sand. The Forever is the biggest, hottest, meanest, driest, dyin'est desert under Alsvid."
"Alsvid?" asked Garoit.
"The name of the sun, chup. It means scorchin' heat, and it was named after a horse."
"Out of Norse mythology," said Garoit. "One of the horses that drew the sun god's chariot."
Ondo shrugged. "Mebbe. Anyways, like I said, west of here you got near three thousand miles to go before you be out of the sand. North you got a third again as much to go before you reach the Greenland Plains. If you want to try east, it's twenty-five hundred miles you got before you reach the Sunrise Mountains and water. There be only one way out, of here and that's south to the Big Grass. There's ways to keep goin' out here on sand grapes and such, but to stay alive, you got to get off the sand."
"How far?" asked Garoit.
"The grass begins mebbe three hundred miles on. I can show you on a map. But as soon as the grass begins, so does Boss Kegel. That's Kegel's territory from the grass down to the Sea of Stars and west to the Southern Divide. You have to go through Kegel, he's nowt goin' to like it, and he's nowt goin' to like what you done. This mob's hit Kegel's pocket like stripes on a squeal."
"Isn't that what you are?" I interrupted. "You're a squeal, right?"
After a moment's pause, Ondo nodded. "Call it what you want, chup. I'm pure and that's why you can trust what I say. Besides, I'm thin now if Kegel brings me home for dinner." He glanced at Alna. "Kegel's short on women, Bando, and you got a plush gang of 'em. Might be a way through."
I looked at Garoit and the beard was smiling and looking at the sand between his feet. "Share your tickle," I said.
He looked at me. "I was just wondering how long I'd be alive after suggesting Ondo's plan to Nance Damas."
I laughed. Alna didn't. Garoit turned toward Ondo. "Is there any other way through Kegel?"
Ondo nodded. "The same way you got through us: Fight." He turned his body to the left which exposed his tied wrists to me. "Chup, could you kindly cut these? If I don't hit the dunes soon, I'll have but nowt for company."
I frowned at Garoit, and the beard smiled and said, "Cut the man loose before he shits in his sheet."
After I cut him loose, Garoit escorted Ondo into the darkness. I held out the cooker to Alna, but she wasn't eating. Instead she was staring at the light from the fire cube. "Another fight?" she muttered. "Will we have to fight again?"
"We don't know that Ondo is on the level. He just might be playing it up for position, or just to make himself look big."
"Is that how you read it, Bando?"
I thought about it for a bit. "No. I believe him, and I think we'll have to fight." I took a bit of the hot box chow and nibbled at it. "It probably won't be the last time, either."
She shook her head and mumbled something that sounded like, "I hope I die first."
I put out my hand to place it on her shoulder, but she pulled away from it. "What's the matter?"
"Bando, I've seen nothing but fighting my entire life. I've never seen anything but fighting, and I've lost everything I've ever had to fighting. I was fifteen the first time I was raped. I lost two brothers in the colors, and even my father when he couldn't stay away from his old gang. My mother and kid sister were killed in a street riot protesting." She shook her head. "I forget what they were protesting." She looked into my face.
"I was married before, and that was one long fight. I used to sit and wait for him to come home at night and beat me and my child. Then he'd rape me. It was the only sex he enjoyed."
She looked at me as though she hated not only me, but all men, which was probably the case. "One time he had me in the hospital with a broken jaw and four broken ribs. That was when he beat my baby girl until she died. Five days later I got out of the hospital and shoved a butcher knife through his heart."
I nodded and said, "And because you waited the five days instead of thinning him right away, you bought the big one and the Crotch."
"Almost right. They gave me murder one, but sent me to Freeman Rehab where I became a guard's favorite rape. Then a bull croc at Freeman named Ilene tried to rape me." She looked up at the starless night sky of Tartaros.
"I shoved my thumbnails into her eyes, and when she was blind I took a hammer and a piece of table leg and showed her what it was like to be raped to death. Then I was sent to Greenville."
She shook her head and said in a whisper of pain, "I can't take it. I can't take it anymor
e. I don't want to fight. I can't fight." Her eyes closed, I reached out my hand, but she turned away and walked into the darkness.
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The Pure
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I told myself that the universe is packed with people I can't help no matter how much I want to help. I dug my heel into the sand as I confirmed to myself that such a state of affairs was no comfort. Anyway, I couldn't think of anyone who needed more help than I did.
A shark, one of the haystack deadheads from the men's side, stopped by my fire cube and squatted next to me. He smiled at me and said, "I hear you have a copy of Yesterday's Tomorrow."
"Who'd you hear that from?"
"Big Dave Cole back in the Crotch told me."
"I didn't know Big Dave hung out with the deadheads."
The man laughed, seemed just about to say something, then he put it to rest. "I'd like to borrow your copy."
"Why?"
"I'll bring it back in an hour or so. We just need it for the meeting."
"You want to buy it?"
Rus Gades nodded. "Yeah, but I'll have to talk to the group about coming up with a price. What do you want for it?"
I looked down as I rubbed the back of my neck. "I don't know. Let me think about it." I reached into my kit bag and pulled out the tiny pumpkin-colored book. I looked at the deadhead.
"You're not going to rip this up for papers or anything like that, are you?"
He shook his head as he smiled. "No. Those of us who used to drug don't do it anymore."
I still hung onto the book because I had never heard such a load of crap in my life. "Just what does your group do?"
"We help each other to recover. We usually start off a meeting with a reading from Yesterday's, but all our stuff was lost in the fight."
"By recover, you mean like from drugs?"
"Addiction. And other things. Haven't you ever heard of CSA?"
I frowned. "The Confederate States of America?"
He chuckled again. "Compulsive Self-destructives Anonymous. We're made up of addicts of various kinds. Drugs, sex, work, gambling, emotions, overeating—"
"I know," I said as I held up my hand. "A platitude for every problem."
"Maybe you'd like to come to a meeting and see for yourself?"
"No thanks." I held out the book. "Take care of it, and you'll have it back in an hour?"
"Right, and thanks a lot."
As I released the tiny volume, I asked, "Did Big Dave belong to your bunch? Just curious."
"I can't say. Our traditions don't allow us to say who is a member."
"I don't see what difference it makes here on Tartaros. I can't exactly phone it in to the nearest vidwatch."
"The rule hasn't changed any." He nodded at me. "I'll bring this back in an hour."
He walked off into the dark and I pondered the prospect that Big Dave Cole might have been in CSA. That was scary to think about, because Big Dave never seemed to need anyone or anything. He always seemed to be happy and comfortable. In fact, that was why I used to talk with him. I used to like to be around him. He was strong, and I could always draw strength from him to last out the Crotch for another day.
It was scary to imagine that the person I had drawn so much strength from was a deadhead, pervert, or some other kind of addict. But then, I didn't know for sure he was a deadhead.
I was stewing that around in my mind when Garoit returned with his prisoner. Pussyface wanted to get some sleep, so he left Ondo Suth with me and didn't order him tied. After the beard had gone, Ondo asked, "Does he trust me?"
I leaned on my elbow and stared at the tiny light. "Who can say? Pussyface is a political. Filberts think different than regular sharks."
"What about you, then, Bando Nicos? You trust me?"
"Hell, no," I laughed.
"Why?"
"Why?" I shook my head and used some of the new lingo I'd picked up. "Dolt out, chup. You're a squeal, right? There's only a couple of things to call a man who trusts a squeal, and that's either stupid or dead."
Ondo looked very hurt, and I laughed at him. "Man, what galaxy are you from? You act like you never seen crowbars before."
"Maybe if I showed you about the sand grapes?"
"Sure, you show me about the sand grapes."
Ondo found some of that retractable grass. He brushed the sand away from the blades until he could get a good grip on them. He pulled and came up with a bunch of roots that looked like tannish-green grapes. He knocked the sand from the bulbs and popped one into his mouth.
"Water," he said as he chewed.
I took one and popped it into my mouth. When I crushed the bulb with my, teeth a deliciously cool squirt of water shot into my mouth. Then came the taste. It began smelling and tasting like wet cardboard. Ondo laughed at my expression.
"It'll keep you alive, but you have to find your happiness someplace else." He waved a hand. "Don't swallow the pulp. It'll give you stomach cramps. Maybe you can trust me now?" He looked at me with wide brown eyes. He was about twenty, although right then he seemed much younger. He began talking in a low voice. "I'm not like you sharks, Bando. I did nowt to get here."
I waved my hand in disgust. "Yeah, I know. The hotel is filled with the innocent. Tell it to the chappy." I spat on the sand. "Where're you from? What hotel?"
"I was born here, Bando. I'm native to Tartaros." My eyebrows went up, and Ondo nodded. "Like I said, chup. I'm one of the no crime, nothin' but time, pure."
He pulled his sheet up over his head and spread it inside out on the sand. He pulled a metal pin from his boot and touched one end to the fire cube. The cube attached itself to the pin and Ondo held the light over the sheet.
"The best I can draw it, this is a map of the Big Land and what I can remember of First Landin'."
From his pocket he pulled a sliver of green wood and held one end in the flame from the fire cube. He marked an 'X' on the Forever Sand and said, "We're about here."
I studied it and said, "It doesn't look all that far to the grass."
"Hey, chup, looky here." Ondo pointed at the map. "There's no scale here, but see the lake called the Sea of Stars?"
I looked and found the large lake in the Big Grass halfway between the 'X' marked on the map and the range of mountains called the Sunrise. "Yeah, I see it. Pretty big, is it?"
"Kind of big, chup. From southwest to northeast it's almost two thousand miles."
If Ondo's map was anywhere near any kind of scale, the Forever Sand was large enough to swallow the North American continent. I began feeling very, very small.
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Under the Horizon
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I listened as Ondo talked late into the night, and I didn't notice when Alna returned. Just at some point I looked and she was there, igniting another blue. She sat next to me, but we didn't touch. While Ondo talked, he kept looking at the map. "East of the Big Land is another continent we call First Landin'. That's where me mums and dads was put down. First Landin' is mostly a desert called t' Graveyard. It's got a tricky range of mountains, too. From the eastern desert it looks all high and even more green than Hell's Divide. The range got the name Last Illusion Mountains, because if you ever fell for the trick, it'd be the last time you ever fell for a trick." He raised his arm and pointed at both sides of the Last Illusion range.
"The Illusion cuts right down the middle of the Graveyard, so if you manage to make it, there's no water in over a thousand miles of desert in whatever direction you pick."
Alna nodded at the map. "Is it called First Landing because the first prison ships put down there?"
Ondo half-shrugged. "That's the story. They used to tell me that the first twenty loads of exiles thinned at the Illusion before someone smarted and went south." A look of pride spread across Ondo's face. "That someone was me dads, Arki
n Suth. He was a geologist from Planet Duat."
"Geologist?" I repeated. "That hasn't been a crime for years."
"He did a swindle or two, hear him tell it. Anyways, as he told the story to me, he knew the image was a mirage cause of the shimmy—a kind of distortion that made the edges move some. He'd seen 'em in deserts on Duat. Trouble was, he couldn't get the leaders to listen. They said the shimmy was just the heat.
"Dads backed off. He was set on stayin' alive, along with some others. It took him a day to figure they'd been put down south of the equator, so it stood t' reason south would be the shortest way out of the sand. The next mornin', with a lot of bad feelin's, he broke off from t' main group. About eleven hundred exiles went with him. It took near eight days, and the water was about all out, but they come upon a wide grassland. Then, at sunset, they come upon a beautiful huge fresh water lake they named Lake Real because so many of 'em thought it was a mirage when they first saw it. There was birds of a sort on the water, and plenty of lughoxen livin' wild. They could of made a home there.
"Once they was there and didn't need me dads to guide 'em, though, the gangs chose up sides and began fightin' again. Me dads tried to cruise 'em, and soon a couple of bosses, real hostie, wanted Dads thinned. So in the middle of the night me dads slides for the south. A sis named Hira, me mums, asked to go along. About fifty others, too. They slid out and went south down the five hundred miles that lake was long. They wanted to stop and set up homes lots of times, but Dads wanted to get clear of the gangs at the top of the lake.
"He led 'em south, away from the lake for near thirty days, until they ran into ocean. They just called it the ocean, but it's called South Sea now. They was a long way from the gangs, but dads didn't want to settle on flatlands backed by salt water, so he gathered up some of the lughoxen and struck out for the west into the mountains. In the middle of the mountains, he found a tiny valley with fresh water, green grasses, and trees so big one of the things sawn into boards could build ten houses. Hira named the valley Our Place, and they started in to build houses."
Martin Stays walked up, put his hands in his pockets, and stood there listening as Ondo continued. "To hear Dads tell it, Our Place was Heaven, if a little dull. He used to say he missed workin' with money and numbers a bit. More than that, Dads was always wonderin' what was under the edge of the sky. From the tops of the mountains we could see a huge lake in the west, and far beyond that, another ocean."
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