Desert World Allegiances

by Lyn Gala

“You didn’t try to kill me, did you?” Shan asked. He wondered if confessions given through hallucinations would be valid for the council. Naite turned his head to the side and looked at him out of one eye like a buteo, one of those large birds that rode the winds for hours, looking for life on the open desert. Shaking his head at his own stupidity, Shan closed his eyes for a second, blocking out the blinding glare of the sun.

  “I’m going to fall on my face if I don’t sit,” Shan whispered to no one in particular. He moved to a spot right next to the cliff and carefully sat, propping his burned leg out in front of him.

  “Do you really think I’d try to kill you?” Naite asked, crouching down in front of Shan. It was annoying the way his face kept blurring into the sky along the edges.

  “Don’t know. Don’t think so, but….” Shan shrugged.

  “Idiot,” Naite said. He sat on the pointed top of a boulder and pulled his legs up under him.

  “You hate me.”

  “No I don’t. I think you’re an idiot, but that’s not the same as hating you.”

  “I wasn’t nice to you when we were kids,” Shan pointed out. He wasn’t sure why he was trying to convince Naite that they hated each other, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

  Naite had to think about that one for a while. “Kids aren’t nice,” he finally answered with a shrug.

  “I didn’t know.” Shan closed his eyes and leaned back into the warm rock. “I promise you on my vows, I didn’t know.”

  “You should have.”

  Shan opened his eyes at the unfamiliar voice. Temar stood there, his arms crossed over his stomach and his blue eyes staring at Shan accusingly.

  “Yep, I should have,” Shan admitted. “I never paid enough attention.”

  “You didn’t want to look at me too long. You didn’t want to admit how you felt when you looked at me for too long.” The light haloed through Temar’s blond hair, and his face was almost angelic. “You’re so busy trying to not do something wrong that you didn’t do anything right. You didn’t protect me.”

  Shan stared at Temar, his guts suddenly cold. “No.”

  “I’m your hallucination. I couldn’t say it if you didn’t already know it was true.”

  Shan reached down and pulled the pipe trap juice bottle off his leg. The liquid inside the bottle had turned a dark, urine yellow as the water evaporated out, and Shan opened the mouth of the bottle and poured it out onto the rocks. Tiny rivers and rapids and waterfalls and tributaries appeared as the juice flowed over the ground and soaked into the white sand. A yellow stain, shaped like an upside-down tree, remained.

  “Doesn’t make what I said less true,” Temar pointed out.

  “I need to change the pipe juice more often,” Shan answered. Of course, that wasn’t an answer, but he had grown skilled at avoidance and obfuscation over the years. He remembered those months after Naite had left the house. He’d grown very skilled.

  Naite rose up out of the yellow tree stain like a pale ghost of himself. “I was a stupid kid. I shouldn’t have left you with Dad, but I really didn’t think he’d go after you. I thought I had done something to lead him on. I thought it was my fault, and that if I was out of the house, things would be better for you. God, Shan. You know this. You know that I’ve always loved you, even if I don’t know how to say it. And you still think I would kill you?” Naite looked so hurt. His face twisted in despair, and Shan reached out for him, only to have Naite’s form explode into dust and swirl away like a sand devil.

  As the sand devil vanished, Temar was left standing in the sun. “If you would have just looked at me… if you would have let yourself admit that you were attracted, then maybe you would have noticed how much trouble I was in.”

  Shan closed his eyes and tried to focus on his thoughts and not the sluggish desire that rolled through him. “I’m a priest. We give up attraction and marriage and children. A married man, a man who is courting someone, he is worried about this world, about his future, about making his life better, here and now. I’m supposed to worry about the next life, about people’s souls, about pleasing God.”

  “So, how is that working for you? Did you save my soul? Are you avoiding thinking about the needs of this world?” Temar’s voice was suddenly bitter, but then considering how Shan had failed him, he couldn’t blame the man for a little hatred and bitterness.

  “I’m still going to try and help you,” Shan said. He didn’t mean to sound defensive, but he did. Silence answered him. When Shan opened his eyes, Temar was gone. The white sand and the red-stained rock and the crystal borax jutting out all waited silently. The yellow tree stain and the hot sun mocked him, and Shan found that he couldn’t summon the energy to care.

  Chapter 10

  WALKING through the open sands, Shan had learned to focus his mind on just one landmark, clearing everything out, so that reaching that landmark became the only goal that existed. For almost three days, his landmark had been the heavy Livre moon. The sand-sculpted mountains and valleys around him shifted and reshaped themselves, hour by hour and minute by minute, but the larger moon, pale and barely visible in the daylight, pulled him in one constant direction.

  His father shadowed his steps sometimes, Naite too. The specters didn’t seem real, not like they had that first day. Now he was aware that they were figments of his imagination, and they had the odd habit of sinking into the ground or blowing away when he wasn’t paying attention to them. Naite had an annoying habit of composing the sort of impromptu ballads workers sometimes indulged in at night when they sat around and ate meals. In reality, Naite never sang, although the sarcasm in his lyrics sounded like Naite. His most constant companion, though, was Temar. The young man varied between gazing at him with wide, injured eyes and spitting hate at him. Sometimes the endless, silent accusations wore at him. Once Shan had stood in the middle of a dune and screamed at them all to leave him alone. They hadn’t, and part of him was glad. They offered an odd sort of companionship, and that was better than the solitude of the white sand.

  “You should have reached the valley, Shan. I don’t like this,” Naite complained. Temar had temporarily vanished, and Shan walked in the illusion of shade that his brother’s image provided.

  When he wasn’t singing about Shan’s various shortcomings, Naite complained a lot. He’d spent hours one day talking about the unfairness of the political systems in the inner worlds. Those distant planets and stations circling distant stars had made promises of land and freedom and a secure future if settlers would just come to Livre. The inner planets wanted Livre’s purified borax deposits and white sands and arsenic and, more importantly, the optic-circuit quality glass that could be made from such unusually pure forms of the basic glass ingredients. But now they were so busy killing each other that they’d forgotten all those promises. When they’d destroyed enough of each others’ jump ships that they needed huge quantities of high-quality glass for optical circuits, they’d be back. But the people who had first come to Livre might be nothing but wind-scoured skeletons in graves by then.

  Of course, Shan knew that this version of Naite was an illusion, because the real Naite complained about chokeweed and rusting water lines, not political deception and the inherent immorality of war. The Naite who was walking next to him right now, complaining about how long it was taking to find the Spence Valley, that sounded more like the real Naite.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Shan asked wearily. He pulled the tube up and sucked at the warm, hallucinogenic and plastic-tasting drops of water. It was never enough to quench his thirst, and once again he eyed the pipe trap juice in the bottle. This latest batch was clearer than any he’d collected yet, and he could feel the temptation to gulp it down. His tongue felt like it was glued to the bottom of his mouth with thick slime, and his lips were cracked and painful, and the pipe juice sloshed against the sides of the plastic bottle so invitingly.

  “Try it and you’ll be sorry,” Naite warned.

  �
�You think I don’t already know that?” Shan shoved at Naite, and his hand went right through his brother’s middle, scattering his body like motes of dust in a sunbeam. One of the little sparks twirled and hovered and then sank down until it rested directly above the sand dune to his right. Shan frowned at the steady light, waiting for the hallucination to waver, but it seemed remarkably constant for a pipe-induced vision.

  “Check it out,” Naite suggested.

  “I can’t just start wandering the desert.”

  “What do you think you’re doing now?”

  Shan took a second to glare at his brother. “I am following a landmark and moving toward Spence Valley.”

  “Either you’re walking slower than an old man or you already passed Spence Valley.”

  “Trust me, I’m walking slower than an old man,” Shan told Naite, but he couldn’t take his eyes off that small and constant point of light.

  “No rock around here. You’re going to have to bed on the sand, and sooner or later, the sandrats are going to find you.” Naite sounded almost worried about that, but since Naite was nothing but a projection of Shan’s own fears, a little terror was to be expected. Shan turned away from the light and looked up at the oversized moon that hung in Livre’s sky, hiding the smaller moon that orbited in its shadow this time of day. The blue of full day was slowly fading into the purple of evening, and the storms on the face of the moon were evident in the swirls of color barely visible.

  “I’m so dead.” Shan breathed the words. Up until this moment, he hadn’t wanted to admit it, but right now, it was not looking good.

  “You’re breathing a little too much to actually be dead,” Temar told him, his ghostly figure rising from the sand. Temar was fuzzy and translucent and had a tendency of getting wavy if Shan stared at him too long, but he still had that odd beauty to him that drew Shan toward him.

  “You’ve been hanging out with Naite too much. You’re sounding like him,” Shan said, turning away. In real life, he’d tried so hard to not pay too much attention to the young man that he hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to him at all, and so now, given the chance to stare at him—to watch Temar’s delicate fingers play with a button and to look into that unusual shade of blue eyes—Shan felt guilty. He had no business indulging himself, especially not when the real Temar was suffering for Shan’s lack of judgment. Besides, he was distracted by that same light winking at him from the same spot on top of the same dune.

  “I’m being honest,” Temar pointed out. “You aren’t dead yet. But if you don’t stop and think for a second, you’re going to be.”

  “I’m not sure that thinking is such a good thing right now.” If Shan stopped to think about things, he’d have to consider the possibility that he had passed Spence Valley. And Landing was a small town, perched on the edge of a rock shelf, and he had no chance of finding it in the middle of all this shifting sand. If he stopped to think, he would be tempted to sit down, drink as much pipe juice as it took to finally quench his debilitating thirst, and then lay on the hot sand and go to sleep. That plan had been slowly fermenting in the back of his mind, and he was trying hard to keep it shoved as far back as he could.

  “I think that you need to stop and look around, or that fantasy may be the only option left.” Temar’s voice interrupted Shan’s sudden desire to just lie down.

  “There’s nothing to look at except sand.” Shan turned in a circle, his hands held wide, and all around him was sand… sand and that one point of light that had never faded.

  “What would it hurt to investigate?” Temar asked.

  “Potentially? Potentially it could cost me my life,” Shan answered truthfully, but he held his life by such a slender thread that it no longer sounded like much of a threat. He’d counseled people facing death. He’d sat by bedsides and in the clinic, and he’d held people’s hands. He’d watched people face death with calm grace or with terror and denial and fury, but he couldn’t seem to feel anything at all for his own death—nothing but a vague, nagging regret. High on that list was the regret that his murderer might get away with this. He was a priest. He was supposed to forgive. But right now, he didn’t feel like forgiving anyone. Give him a gun, and he would seriously considering shooting someone… just as soon as he figured out which someone he was supposed to be shooting.

  “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t pull your head out of your ass,” Naite threatened.

  “Alright. You two are a bad influence on each other.” Shan wiggled his finger between Naite and Temar before he took a ninety-degree turn and headed for that distant, blinking light. As he got closer to the base of the huge sand dune, the top of the dune swallowed the point. “This is so stupid,” Shan muttered to himself when the light slipped below the horizon. Not even his hallucinations wanted to try and climb this monster with him, so Shan set his feet into the rippled sand, sank in up to his knees, and started wading up the uneven surface.

  A half dozen times, he had to stop and lay on his stomach, his arms outstretched as he let his trembling and burning legs rest. A dozen times, he fell and tumbled down the steep slope. Each time he stopped, the wind dusted him with sand, but Shan kept climbing until the sharp and rippled top edge appeared, white against the blue sky. When Shan’s hand reached the top of the dune, clawing at it, the ridge collapsed, and sand showered down on him. Only then did the twinkling light reappear, this time attached to a sharp point of metal that rose high into the sky.

  “Oh Lord.” Shan’s heart pounded in relief. “Thank you, God.” He’d found the signal tower for Spence Valley.

  Chapter 11

  TEMAR shifted in the bed. Ben’s body was hot and heavy against his side, and his skin crawled at the contact. Only now, in the night, when darkness hid his face, did Temar let himself truly feel the emotions washing through him like a giant sand dune, shifting in the wind and threatening to bury him under his own hatred. He hated Ben.

  Before his slavery, he thought he’d known hate. He’d hated the pipe trap juice that his father would carefully funnel into old juice bottles and then hide, as if his children wouldn’t notice he was drunk. He hated George Young, who would drive past and look at them with disgust. He hated the slow encroachment of poverty and despair, the way he couldn’t afford the nails to fasten down the roof boards to keep the dust out.

  At least, he thought he’d hated those things, but he hadn’t. What he’d felt then were soft, little emotions that tickled at him and annoyed him until he wanted to strike out. But what he felt for Ben Gratu wasn’t soft or little. Temar shifted slightly, hungry for some space.

  Ben shifted, throwing an arm over Temar’s stomach, and Temar froze. He wished he still felt the need to recoil from Ben’s touch, but the fact was that he’d grown used to Ben’s heavy, hot hands on him.

  “Going somewhere?” Ben asked, his lips so close that his breath tickled Temar’s ear.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” Temar answered. If he stayed in bed with a fully awake Ben, he had no doubt where that would lead. His hips and thighs were still bruised, and he wanted some time to heal. He wanted to walk down to the bathroom and spend ten minutes pretending that he wasn’t trapped in the middle of a nightmare. He’d lie to himself for that long.

  “Without permission?” Ben asked, and that was his mock patience. That was the tone of voice that suggested Temar was about to be bound or gagged or leashed or pushed down over a table and a belt taken to the backs of his thighs, all in the name of teaching him a little discipline.

  “No, sir.”

  Ben pushed himself up on one elbow, his hair sticking up and his eyes blurry with sleep. “Do you really want to lie to me?”

  “No, sir,” Temar quickly answered. “I wasn’t going to leave without permission. I just….” His mind blanked out with fear as Ben frowned.

  “Yes?” Ben’s voice was the voice of an imperious ruler, annoyed by some subject about to get beheaded, like in one of those old vids of Earth history.

  �
��I was squirming. I have to pee, but I didn’t know if it was bad enough to be worth waking you up.” The words tumbled out. Temar fisted the sheets as he waited to see if it was enough, if he had placated the monster inside Ben Gratu.

  Ben’s frown slowly faded, replaced by a look of sympathy. “You know I’m always here for you. You should have woken me.” Ben put his hot palm on Temar’s chest, and his hand slowly drifted down until it rested over Temar’s abdomen. Then he started slowly pressing down. The urge to pee made Temar squirm and hiss. He tried to control the reaction, because he knew that pain just made Ben more curious, more voyeuristic. It was as if Ben drank up Temar’s despair and pain like a dying man in the desert drank water—greedily. Temar only wished the analogy was complete and that Ben would get stomach cramps and vomit from ingesting so much.

  After a second, Ben gentled his touch. With one calloused finger, he traced a pattern over Temar’s stomach. “Such a very good boy you are to worry about what would please me… or displease me. But I don’t ever want you to hold back when it comes to your needs, Temar. It’s my job to take care of you.”

  Temar swallowed. He hated the fact that his body was reacting to Ben’s tone. Ben was happy, so for just a second, Temar was safe. He felt like glass that was cooled too fast, like he could hear the creaking that came right before the glass shattered.

  He’d been in a glass shop once when that happened. A wind had picked up the edges of the tent where the glassblower had been working, and Temar had been about six, so he’d sat in the sand, watching. The artisan had pulled the orange-hot glass out of the oven, blowing it into a giant bubble and twirling the blow rod. But he’d gotten the shape he wanted too quickly, and he tried to save the piece by putting it under the cooling fans. The glass creaked, and even though it wasn’t a loud sound, every artisan in the tent had stopped. Men and women had looked around, and then the glass bubble shattered.

  He still remembered the tiny red trails up the artisan’s arms, tiny scores made by the passage of glass fragments. Sometimes Temar fingered the bruises Ben left, the purpling finger marks and the straight-edge belt scores, and he felt like that glassblower. Other times, he thought he was the glass bowl, ready to shatter.