Dunes Over Danvar Omnibus

by Michael Bunker

  The Poet had seen men die in ways he’d never thought possible back when he was a boy spending his days running errands and polishing his daddy’s sarfer. Back when he was learning the ways of the sand. He released the rope he was holding for a second and knocked the matte from his hair. Some of it fell down into the top of his ker, working its way into the corners of his mouth and beard, but the rest went back home to join the swells of particulate that—as far as he knew—covered the whole earth but for the distant mountaintops out west.

  Topping a dune up ahead of him, Bolger shouted, and as the Poet came up behind him he saw him pointing toward a disruption on the horizon. Maybe an oasis, or maybe a copse of treetops jutting up from the sand. Likely to be water either way. His man kept on his draft and the convoy headed for the feature on the horizon. Sun was up full now and hot. Water would be necessary if Bolger planned to push them farther north.

  The Depths

  Chapter Four

  At first only the oranges filled Peary’s visor, but as he stretched and pushed downward he could see the farther-off purples and tinges of blue and aqua. He kicked against what he’d hardened behind himself and felt the looser sand that flowed around his visor and chest give way to his motion. He was dragging the two spare tanks, but going down he didn’t feel them.

  The aqua color down there—down at the fringes of his vision, now giving way to darker purple—reminded him of Marisa, and the polished rocks, turquoise and green, she’d bought from a trader once with precious coin. He loved her for that, too, even if he didn’t get it and thought it was wasteful. There was no sorting it. A woman loved what she loved, and who could figure it?

  As he descended, the cool came, and he felt it through his suit, and welcomed it. He sipped on his tank and stretched for the deep. He’d forgotten to count, which was more of a habit than a rule, but his visor showed him at fifty meters and he was just starting to feel the press in his chest. Not tight yet, but firm and good. He liked the feel of fifty to a hundred, and maybe another twenty or thirty after that, but then the real pushback came, and he didn’t like that so much.

  The air from his tanks was nice and sweet, but he had a tiny stream of gunk making its way into his goggles. Nothing tragic, but not ideal. He concentrated on moving the sand and flowing it smoothly around himself. No blips on his visor yet. He didn’t expect to see the sandscrapers of Danvar yet—those were said to be a mile down, and even if they were half that he wouldn’t see them on this dive—but depth and distance were odd out in the shifting dunes. He’d often found salvage at less than one fifty, and had hit hard ground at less than two hundred before. And this time he was going deeper.

  At one hundred and fifty he felt the press and he dropped his first tank. He watched it disappear behind him, glowing bright red in his visor with orange at the edges. With his twin tanks, he was good down past two hundred meters and could still make it back without a spare. If he was careful with his breathing, two fifty was doable. Beyond that and he’d have to rely on the spares—and he’d be well past his deep.

  Peary stretched out and tried to slow his breathing even more, felt his muscles strain, and his mind too. He tried to keep himself going straight vertical, and focused on keeping the sand closest to his upper body as loose as possible. The pushback was strong; he could feel the tightness around his neck, and his lungs had to work to push outward with each breath. And to think that people—mere human divers—had gone down half a mile or more? Or so the rumors went.

  Then he could see it. Not through his visor, but in his mind’s eye. His own body trapped in the sand. He immediately pushed that thought away, because that was the thought that would kill you. He’d almost coffined like that before, at a much shallower depth. A lapse like that and everything around him would turn hard as stonesand and his next breath would never come. Even with the tank and whatever precious oxygen remained in it, his lungs would never expand again, because the sand would crush in on him and thwart his inhale. So he put his thoughts on Marisa, and he pictured himself telling her he loved her and how much he appreciated her.

  Past two hundred meters. The death zone. Hard to tell now because the reading in his visor was starting to fade. Losing all contact with the surface. He stopped and looked around, concentrated on keeping the sand soft around himself. He looked down, and when he calmed himself, he saw the first dot of orange, and then red, and it surprised him. As if this whole dive had been an exercise and he’d never really hoped to find anything. He moved again. The dot grew until he knew he was looking at a something. Angular. Solid and manmade. Straight lines heading down and away from a point that was changing from orange to red and then a deeper red. The lines moving away disappeared into greens and shades of blue.

  He pushed down, the sand behind him becoming harder than stone, the pushback growing with each meter. And then the yellow appeared. Two forms, clinging to the red structure with orange where the two colors met. And he knew what they were, the two shapes in yellow.

  They were men. Divers just like him.

  And they were dead.

  No One Really Knows

  War in the Wastes

  Chapter Five

  Two of Bolger’s divers were down under the sand. Down there with large jars and water skins, searching for the underground spring or river that once wetted the trees whose tops now served as leaning posts for the rest of the crew. Everyone just waited in the sun and drained their own canteens so that they would be empty and prepared for more. Water was the other truth of the world, water and sand. Only, a man could live without sand.

  The Poet licked his lips, even though he knew better. Waste of water, and it made them dry out faster. His daddy used to smack him when he licked his lips out in the dunes under the relentless sun. He would say, “Go on and cut your wrists, boy, it’ll be faster!”

  The sand near where the divers had disappeared didn’t stir, and all the men were watching, waiting for one of the divers to break the surface, to hold up those precious containers of liquid life. Someone told an awful joke, and everyone laughed, even the other divers, even though the joke was about how divers dying down there was just something to be expected.

  That’s when the first man died. He was in mid-laugh when it happened. He was a diver too, laughing about divers dying, and a spear went through his throat and pinned him to the gnarly gray-black treetop that arrogantly dared poke its way up through the sand.

  Then the arrows and spears rained down and one nearly took off the top of the Poet’s head, too. Knocked him right down into the sand, and he saw the blood flow down, mixing with the silica and grit. His own blood, red and thick.

  He glanced up and men were falling everywhere, most dead and some wounded, and other men were streaming down the dunes toward them. Brigands. Screaming in the voice of war. At a glance they looked like they could be Brock’s men, but the Poet couldn’t tell with blood running into his eyes. The two divers poked up then, at just the wrong time, and the Poet saw them killed right quick. They always thought they’d die down under the sand, or up on top in a bar somewhere, but they died half in and half out, with sand up to their waists.

  Without hesitation, the Poet reached under his robe and activated his suit. He’d learned to dive as a boy, hiding from his father in the box town outside of Low-Pub. And he was good, too—a natural, they said. He never dove deep and he never took salvage, but he could move sand like no one’s business. But that was before his daddy taught him about the fundamental worthlessness of a diver, about how being a diver was like being a dog, only without the intrinsic values of loyalty and obedience that came with the canine species. So the Poet had given up diving, though he kept up his skills by going out a couple of times a year—out into the Thousand Dunes, to make sure he could survive.

  Now he took a big gulp of air and made himself sink until the sand swallowed him whole. He struggled with the robe on, but what could he do? He worked his way under the sand and over to his gear bag, and when he knew h
e was near it he thrust his hand up above the surface and groped around until he felt his hand hit the bag.

  Open the bag. Reach in for the visor. Now goggles. Got it.

  He dove again, the sand ripping at the gash on his scalp, and when he was ten meters down he stopped and softened up the sand enough that he could pull on his goggles and visor. He went through the process of trying to clear the gunk from around his eyes, but he knew the best he could do was remove enough to allow him to see colors through the visor.

  His lungs were straining now, driving him to want to exhale. He hardened the sand by his feet and pushed off toward the north, kicking for all he had. He would need to clear the nearest dune before he could risk surfacing for a split second to grab a breath. He pushed and kicked and he could feel his head growing lighter and the blood pulsing in his temples and neck. Counting down, he supposed, to his death. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He was already operating beyond his abilities, he thought. Yet he kicked and kicked, and when he thought he couldn’t go another stroke, he kicked again.

  He guided himself by the colors. When it looked to him like he’d cleared the nearest dune and was on the backside, he pushed again. Angling upward, toward the purple, he moved his body skyward as his every cell screamed for him to exhale and then suck in anything—anything at all. He broke the surface in a burst of energy and rolled onto his back, gasping and straining for air. One second. Two seconds. And then he turned back to his stomach. He forced himself to not just lie there, and when the first dollop of blood hit the sand in front of his face, he sucked in all the air he could and dove again. He calmed himself. This time he moved more slowly, kicking his feet against the sand that he hardened behind himself and pulling himself forward with each stroke. His muscles were screaming, but he put that pain out of his mind. After a one-hundred count, he pushed up toward the purple again, letting only a portion of his face break the surface this time. He sucked in air and grit and dove again.

  In this way, he pushed farther north, farther into the wastes.

  The Sand Don’t Care

  Chapter Six

  Peary did a cursory hand search around the bodies. Both dead men were in dive suits, coffined in the sand. He tested the first man’s tank and tried to take a breath through the regulator, but the tank was dry. Both of the bodies clung to some kind of metallic superstructure that came to a point at the top, with long antennae pointing up from there toward the surface. Down a ways he could see where horizontal shafts of steel extended outward from this main tower where he’d found the bodies.

  The dead men were only a few feet apart, so whatever had happened, it looked like they had died together. Maybe there was some peace for them in that, but Peary wouldn’t know. He was, as always, alone.

  He softened the sand as best as he could, but it was tough going at that depth. He did the calculations in his mind and he realized he didn’t have enough juice to make it back to the top if he tried to drag both divers’ bodies with him, even if he could physically do it, which he doubted. One diver was clutching some kind of case in his hands, and had obviously been trying to get the salvaged materials back up to the surface when something had happened. It was a pretty common story with divers. Coffining happened most often either when a diver panicked, or was trying to move heavy salvage.

  Instinctively, Peary reached his hand down the man’s leg to see if the man was carrying a dive knife—something that might have his name on it so that the body could be identified. He couldn’t find the knife, but he did find out what had contributed to the man’s death.

  There was a long, steel cable wrapped tightly around the man’s leg. He felt farther down and found the cable’s other end was wound almost in a knot around the heavy metal of the structure. He pulled hard a few times to try to free the diver’s leg, but the man was stuck and there was no extricating him.

  Peary took a pull on his own regulator and got that response that told him his own oxygen was running out. Better get moving or there’ll be three dead bodies down here. He was to the bottom of his twin tanks. Obviously, he’d been down here longer than he thought. A lot longer.

  Don’t panic. You have a spare, and another waiting at one fifty.

  It was time to go. When he felt his tanks were completely empty, he swapped out the twins for his one spare, but he didn’t start breathing from the new tank yet. He needed to ration his air. If for some reason he couldn’t find his stashed tank on the way back up, he would probably die. No two ways about it now. Peary checked the other dead diver and found no dive knife or any other item that might be used to identify him. This man was also clutching a hard-sided case, so Peary freed the two cases from the dead men’s clutches and then took his first long breath from his new tank. He felt his blood respond to the oxygen. Time to head back up.

  He oriented himself by following the direction the antennae pointed, red arrows directing him to life, and when he was ready, he pushed toward the surface. His mind had been on the salvage, and now that he was kicking upward he once again realized just how dense the sand was at this depth. Now, instead of sinking down while carrying only spare air tanks, he was struggling against both gravity and the sand pressure while trying to drag two heavy cases up. The effort required was multiplied, and he was using a whole lot more oxygen, working to flow the sand around both himself and the cases he carried with him.

  He felt like he was making no progress at all. Meters were counted in what seemed like minutes and not seconds. He almost coffined again when he felt panic begin in his mind and then tremor down his whole body. When that happened, the sand tightened on his throat and chest—and only by stopping and re-focusing his mind was he able to loosen the sand enough to continue his upward journey.

  His biggest problem was that he had no idea how deep he was. His visor had yet to pick up the surface, so he had no reading on his depth. He stared upward and couldn’t see even the faintest trace of the blood red indicator that would mean he’d found his spare tank. He struggled, pulling against the sand, and he was forced once more to stop and re-focus his mind. It was harder to push toward the surface dragging the bags. Harder than he’d expected.

  The sand don’t care!

  He didn’t know why he thought those words at that moment, but he did think them. He’d heard the phrase bandied about by divers who’d been around awhile and were still alive. Those who’d made it through tough scrapes. It was true. The sand didn’t care. But Marisa did, and that made him move.

  He kicked again, pushing surface-ward, but on his second kick he felt his tank go dry—and there was still no red object above him on which he could focus his attention. Nothing to give him hope. In the distance, he could barely make out the faint pulse of his beacon on the surface. Too far away to mean anything if he didn’t find the spare tank. He adjusted his regulator and reached back to fiddle with the knob, checking the line too. Nope. Already his mind was screaming and fear was causing him to sweat despite the cold. He knew he could hold his breath for several minutes more, but his body didn’t listen to his mind, and that craving to exhale came upon him like never before. He dropped one of the cases—an offering, or maybe it was just panic—and pushed harder upward. Still no red in sight, and he felt himself growing lightheaded, and all the while the weight and pushback impressed upon him that the sand didn’t care.

  Bleeding Red

  Chapter Seven

  When the Poet figured he’d gone a quarter mile, bobbing to the surface for breaths after every dune, he stopped and waited just under the sand with his body mostly buried and his head in the lee of a rise. He waited for the sun to go down, and for the moonrise over the wastes to light up the silica like little diamonds or stars in the night.

  The bleeding from his head hadn’t fully stopped, but he applied pressure with his hand as best as he could. And when that blue-gray glow was sufficient that he knew he could travel safely in the shadows of the dunes, the Poet surfaced and walked back to the site of the battle. Struggling. St
ep by step. On top of the sand, but still subject to its whims. He had to know if any of the team was spared; and if no one had lived, then he needed to look for gear or weapons. Anything that might give him a chance at survival.

  When he reached the site of the battle, he wasn’t really that surprised by what he found. No survivors there, and the bodies he could find had been stripped by the brigands. There were no tools or canteens left behind, or even a spare ker to stanch the blood seeping from his head. Bad luck. He sat down against a dune and cried for a moment, not knowing what he should do.

  This was no way to treat a valuable man. His life was worth more than this. If it was Brock and his men, they should have known better. They’d treated him just like a common diver. And although he had trouble grasping it, it was very likely that they’d succeeded in killing him along with the others—it was just taking a little longer for him to die. No way he could walk the dozens of miles back to Springston, and the wastes had a way of making even faint hope disappear with the sift. Dying like a diver, robbed and bleeding out in the wastes. No, this was no way for a valuable man to go out.

  He tried to calculate how many days he could go, and how much battery he had left in his suit, but his calculations went awry as his head began to spin and his consciousness drifted in and out like the sift. He brought his hands to his face and saw the blood was still running down past his temple and matting in his beard. He tried to mouth the word “blood,” but he never got it out before he fell unconscious back onto the dune. For its part, the dune received him with apathy. Just another body in the sand.