Chapter 4 - The Ocean of Dunes

Author’s Note

Have you ever deeply considered being lost at sea? Your ship was wrecked by a horrible storm, and it’s just you alone on an inflatable raft, bobbing in the waves and baking in the sun and wondering how long you’ll last before you starve, or die of dehydration, or are capsized by a wave? How desperate might you feel for rescue, and how willing might you be to accept any offered, no matter how questionable the person rescuing you might be?

What an interesting concept. Why, I bet a person in that situation would be willing to overlook any number of “red flags”, any number of suspicious activities or language. Sure, the person who just picked you up might be a monster, but better the monster who might hurt you, than exposure to the elements, which most definitely will.

It’s hard to consider the many things that are worse than death, when death is the problem staring you directly in the face.

Nestor awoke to a bleary world flashing red. He blinked a couple times and reached to wipe the sleep from his eyes.

Something was beeping. A warning alarm.

He could not tell what the purpose of the alarm was. ‘ATMO’ flashed on the console display, which made little sense. He could breathe just fine. In fact, he could breathe well enough to go back to sleep. He felt an overwhelming urge to ignore the alarm and lay back down. His defiant eyes closed and he could feel himself sinking back, to float on clouds that would enwrap and support him and carry him off.

At a great remove, he could still hear the alarm beeping. Its insistence urged him back, and he struggled, held fast by the swirls of the cloud on which he floated. It pulled him down towards a deep abyss below, and he wished only to enter the abyss, and he knew this was wrong. This was all wrong.

It was right there, just outside his perception. He could feel it stopping him from drifting down. Echoing out to him from the void was his father’s muffled voice, suppressed in the way of a person trying to speak to you through their helmet, rather than using suit-to-suit coms. He giggled at the idea of his dad speaking through a helmet. Nestor pictured him mouthing words, waving frantic hands. Why was this such a funny idea? What was wrong with his face? It was…angry? No, not anger…fear? No, that wasn’t right, it was more like…urgency.

A memory floated up in his vision. From long ago, before his mother’s death. Years before Eric had passed, and out on the range for the day with his father in one of the huts. It was ancient and crumbling and wheezed out air and smelled of oil and methane and burnt toast. In the center of it was a rectangular pit into which water ice was fed by a conveyor from the outside, surrounded by a meter-high wall to prevent accidental falls. Inside those walls was a metal funnel with a pair of spinning rollers in the center for pulverizing the ice prior to heating.

Nestor remembered lifting himself up onto the walls to look down at the ice crushers, the massive metal rollers unpowered and unmoving while his father bent to work on their drive motor. He could feel the wall top digging into his belly as he leaned forward to look further down. He wished to see the rollers better, for they were loud and shiny, and he wondered what would happen if he threw in various items. In his hand, the wrench his father had given him so he could ‘help’ by pounding on various things around the hut. He considered what might happen to the wrench if it were put into the crusher. Could that crusher crush the device for fixing the crusher? He decided the crusher could not crush the wrench, and to test this hypothesis from the top of the wall.

He dropped back down, setting the wrench carefully on the wall top next to where he planned his ascent, then placed both hands flat on top, level with his chin. He pushed down hard with both arms. He rose to waist level and leaned forward, bringing his leg up to the wall top, yet struggled to pull himself the rest of the way. He adjusted his knee forward a bit more, he almost had it. He pushed even harder, finally getting up, but still his other leg was hanging down. To get it up he pivoted to the side, and his knee brushed the wrench, which fell into the unmoving crusher with a crash.

His father asked from his station by the motor, “What was that?”

“Nothin’ daddy, I just dwop the wench.”

He lay on the wall top, looking down at the wrench. It had landed crosswise of the two metal rollers, and he considered it would not enter between them lying this way. It would need to be repositioned. It was just there, so close, and he reached down with one arm, but was well short. He stretched further, holding the wall with one arm tightly while he bent out over that chasm.

The crusher abruptly came to life as his father finished his repairs, and the wrench hopped and skipped on top of the rollers, and he reached out thinking that he could grab it when it bounced, but each swipe missed. He needed to be further down, and he reached out as far as he dared, his leg slipping off his perch atop the wall. Then his father screamed, a booming sound that echoed loud inside the tiny hut, louder than even the clatter of the crusher, “NESTOR WHAT ARE YOU DOIN’?”

Hands gripped his shoulders hard, and pulled him away from the wall and turned him, lifting him to his father’s eye level. His father chastised with terror in his eyes, “WHAT WERE YOU THINKIN’?”

His father’s face smudged into blurs as Nestor’s eyes filled with tears, not from the danger nor being rescued therefrom, but the expression on his father’s face and the volume of his father’s words.

“That was very dangerous, Nestor. You could have fallen in.”

Louis hugged him tightly.

“I couldn’t stand to lose you, son. You have got to be more careful.”

Louis lowered him to the ground, keeping his huge, powerful hands still tightly on Nestor’s shoulders.

“Don’t go near those crushers, Nestor.”

His father’s face lowered to his level, still smudged out with tears. The tears cleared and his father’s face resolved sharply into focus, but this was not that younger version from all those years ago. This was the face ravaged by grief and drink. The look of panicked fear overwhelmed this much older father’s face. “Nestor. NESTOR.” The powerful hands shook him, hard. “NESTOR PUT ON YER HELMET RIGHT NOW.”

Wait, that didn’t happen.

Nestor sat forward, his head swimming. He was so dizzy. Why was he sitting up? He just wanted to sleep. To dream. He smiled, thinking of his father. He wondered where father was right now. He’d be checking the lines today, driving out in the old truck. Wait, no he wouldn’t. Nestor was in that truck now. What was he doing in the truck? Was he supposed to be checking the lines? No, father checked the lines. Father. His face welled up again in Nestor’s mind, with that same look. What was that look? What was he saying?

PUT ON YOUR HELMET RIGHT NOW

His helmet. Where was his helmet? He looked to the passenger seat beside him. His helmet was there. He should put it on. His father wanted him to put it on. He reached over and lifted it experimentally. It seemed heavy, much too heavy to wear.

The alarm was still beeping. What was that alarm for? He paused, the helmet in his hands, looking blankly at the alarm screen. ATMO was flashing there. ATMO. Helmet. He grappled with the confusing fact screaming out at him from every angle that he was out of breathable atmosphere in this truck. He needed to use his suit to breathe and needed his helmet on to activate the suit. He leaned forward and slid the helmet over his head and clicked it down into place. His suit beeped and his visor briefly fogged as his helmet flooded with fresh air. His head swam for a moment and he closed his eyes. He was still so sleepy, but it felt as if he were truly waking up now. He blinked his eyes open again, confusion beginning to fade as he looked around the interior of the truck.

He reached forward and hit a button beside the warning panel, changing the screen to pull up the truck’s atmospheric status. CO2 was dangerously high and O2 was virtually gone. The atmospheric scrubbers must have failed. He pushed the button again, cycling through status screens to determine why the scrubbers had failed, until he got to the power screen, finding there that he had no battery charge remaining, and no power generation from the truck’s solar panels. The only power left in the entire vehicle was the emergency microvolt batteries that powered alarms, screens, and door access.

Nestor attempted to peer outside the truck to see if he could determine why the solar panels weren’t working, but could not see through the layer of orange dust filtering only shaded umber light through. He pulled the door lever and the emergency door access servos whirred to life and the door wheezed as it slid up and back on its tracks. The dust shaken loose by this movement cascaded in rivulets down and off the exterior panel. The wind caught it as it fell and billowed the curtains of dustfall out. Nestor watched the last of it trickle down and then stepped gingerly onto a slope of accumulated sand that had drifted against the vehicle, rising just over the bottom door sill and entirely engulfing the truck’s huge knobby-tired wheels. He sank in the sand to his ankles, and he waded down the slope and away from the truck until he came to the bottom of the sandwave and there stepped free. He turned slowly, taking small steps, to look back at the truck’s solar panels.

The one solar panel Nestor could see hung limp upon its retractable strut with the wind spinning and slapping it against the side of the truck, its cracked blue-black face casting negative image rainbows of those fissures upon the sand as it twirled. He walked to the other side of the truck to find both panel and strut stolen by the wind, and he turned to see where they might have blown but saw no clue of their travels or their continued existence.

He looked at the waves of dunes surrounding and he looked up at the sun in its low angle on the horizon and he determined which way was south. He believed in that direction should lie the southern wall of the Mariner Valley, and he shaded his eyes and looked out and strained his vision until it felt his eyes might pop from their sockets entirely, and he still could not see that wall. He walked to the back of the truck, pulled down the ladder, and climbed up to stand on the roof to get more height. He spun in frustration, trying to see something, anything, that could help him reconnoiter where in the Valley he was, but saw only rolling dunes breaking and forming and cresting and stretching to eternity.

Nestor dropped into a squat there on the roof of the truck and tried to decide what to do next, tried to remember any factoid he might know about the geography of the Valley, but the only thing that entered his awareness at all was of the sands skittering all about him, and the wind pushing impatiently at him, and the stark sun glaring down upon him from her perch above. He lowered himself to sit on the edge of the roof and tapped the back of his heel against the side of the truck while he thought.

He mentally multiplied his best guess of his average rate of speed by his estimate of how long he’d been driving, and he decided this must place him perhaps eight hundred kilometers at best from the place where the Labyrinth and Valley met, and he assumed this must mean he was close to the settlements of the Valley, which he believed to occupy its eastern half.

He knew the truck to be dead for he had no other way to provide it with electricity, and he knew he could not stay with it for now it was little more than a useless cave of metal, and he knew within the truck he had a good supply of batteries to power his suit and enough water to keep him alive for days and a couple spare tubes of Sour Apple nutrient paste somewhere, and he knew these items combined were enough to keep him walking for a good long time indeed.

He decided to load up with supplies and walk east, and he decided to believe that he might come across someone who could help him out there, and he decided that even if he stumbled and fell and died lost in that ocean, it could not be worse than sitting here on this island and feeling his air slowly leave him knowing he’d had the chance to save himself and had not taken it.

He walked out over a kinetic landscape. He trudged up and over the dunes, attempting new strategies with each new dune and finding them all similarly difficult. Near noon, he crested the tallest dune yet and turned to look back at his tracks. As he traced them down the dune and up the slope of the prior one, he caught a glint just beyond, far behind him. He shaded his eyes from the sun and hoped for the briefest moment it might be some rescuer, before realizing that the glint was his own truck, and he’d walked, at most, three kilometers since leaving it behind. He collapsed in the sand with exasperated tears rolling down his cheeks, his visor fogging with the extra moisture for a moment before the suit’s scrubbers dutifully removed it from his air. He’d been walking at a rate of less than one kilometer per hour, which meant that even if he were to walk all day and all night, he would only march perhaps a hundred kilometers before his final battery would give up its last bit of charge, and he would then suffocate while still climbing through this endless erg.

He sat at the crest of the dune for a long time and hugged his knees close to him with the wind ceaselessly blowing skiffs of sand up and over that peak, covering his boot toes every few minutes. His mind alternated between racing thoughts about what to do next and a melancholic and hopeless numbness, a psychic distance between his reality and what he wished it to be. The sun arced through the sky, falling lower and lower, and as it dropped the temperature fell enough that a ground fog rose in the valleys and slip faces of the largest dunes. He stood up, knowing that he had to get moving, feeling certain that darkness and night exposed outside was a death sentence. He had to find some sort of shelter.

Nestor slid down the face of the dune upon his rear, and at the bottom found he lacked the will to climb another. He looked at the shifting valleys around him. He picked one at random, and he walked for hours more. The sun fell behind the dunes, and the mist rose as the shadows grew and filled the little valleys between the dunes such that the entire sea appeared bestilled, and submerged Nestor entirely, and he navigated that subnautical place listless and blind in the fog.

As night spread, it grew even colder, and the fog crystallized and fell all around him in a super-light flurry of carbon dioxide snow. The sky shifted from slate blue to purple above, and the first stars pierced through the dark, and shy Phobos peeked above the horizon, hanging low in the sky, appearing and disappearing behind the dunes as Nestor walked. His suit started beeping as the battery neared its end, but Nestor demurred changing it out for fresh as swapping batteries in environs exposed to the sand and dust suspended in the air was guaranteed to end with sand and dust around the battery terminals, causing that metal to oxidize and short and reduce both battery life and rechargeability. He needed to find shelter first. He turned off the alarm and resumed walking and hoped while he walked that the next turn would provide an answer.

He walked for some time longer, the purple sky turning black, and he tried to make out Earth above him but soon gave up as nothing could be made of the riotous stardust pouring out as a river through the sky that offered to carry him along inverted over this caustic ocean of surface dust to a place distant on the horizon where both classes of dust would meet and would eddy there to pull him to places unseen and unknown by anything living or dead.

Phobos rose high enough that no dune crest obscured her, and she stood in service as his polestar to help him reconnoiter a track through the snaking valleys. No shelter appeared, no cave nor hut nor abandoned sand skimmer. He trudged along and tried to decide whether to dig a sand shelter here in a valley somewhere, or to climb a dune and spend the night at the crest. The notion that a wind might come up and bury him alive in his sand shelter pushed him instead to climb the nearest dune crest, and thereupon he sat and gazed out at the swells shining all about him.

Nestor waited to change batteries until his air tasted stale and he was pulling harder and harder with each subsequent breath and he shivered all over uncontrollably. He shouldered off his bag, retrieved a fresh battery, removed the old one, and peered at both batteries through small holes in the frost covering his visor. He slotted the new battery by feel and the suit powered back up and the visor ice disappeared and his body was bathed in warmth. He glanced down at the suit status display on his wrist, and he swore at the message displayed there advising a poor connection. Dust was on one of the battery terminals, just as he had feared might happen. This battery and every battery after it was going to have a drastically reduced lifespan. Assuming the dust didn’t fully corrode a terminal during one of the next hot-swaps. He’d be lucky to make it till tomorrow night, in that instance. No stopping tonight. He had to keep going. He couldn’t waste the air sitting.

Nestor walked the rest of that night. He swapped out batteries three times as he walked, and grappled with fresh existential horror as every new battery lasted less than the one previous. As he walked, the dunes seemed to shrink, and in this easier country his pace felt like it was picking up. When the sun crested the pygmy dunes in front of him, he was swapping in his final battery. This one seemed to have trouble staying in the slot. Not like it mattered now that he had no further batteries to sacrifice to the dust. He ascended a dune once again to reconnoiter and for this purpose he chose the largest one he could find and by the time he had scrambled to the top, the sun had risen enough to heat the snow between the dunes and sublimate it into a new fog that filled in the depression he just left. He spun a slow circle at the dune crest and came to a stop when he saw his savior sitting atop a dune perhaps a kilometer distant.

It was a sand skimmer, of a different design from those he was used to seeing back home, wider and lower upon its massive dull black balloon tires, with articulated struts connecting those tires to an aerodynamic body atop which stood dual vertical solar panels that projected up in a “v” and rotated about much like long ears triangulating the sources of distant sounds.

The skimmer must have noticed him, for it launched forward, shooting up dual tails of grit as it began its descent down the dune face. It appeared to bob up and down over the dunes as it approached, and it came to a stop in the dune valley below him with the last traces of fading ground fog wisping about its wheels. At first Nestor slid down the slope eagerly, and he was most of the way down, perhaps ten meters away from the skimmer, when he froze in his tracks, becoming acutely aware that he did not know this person who’d just arrived in a strange vehicle. A stranger who had apparently been looking for him.

The top hatch of the skimmer opened, and a man appeared through that portal and raised a hand in greeting. Nestor could not see much of the rest of his suit, but the man’s helmet was itself a curiosity as it appeared very much like an inverted clear glass bowl, transparent, bulbous, and affixed to the suit. The man inside was middle-aged, with graying temples and leather skin. He was wearing a flat-brimmed hat, which was big enough that the edges folded up slightly against the helmet worn over it. He had a full, long beard, with the collar of a shirt poking up into the helmet.

The stranger gestured bizarrely to Nestor, and the boy came to realize after much cryptographic decipherment that the stranger wished for him to communicate over Channel Two of his coms and he complied and cautiously asked, “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Ah, there you are, brother. Wasn’t sure you understood me.”

“Sorry, sir. I understood you. I’m jes…surprised to see someone out here.“

“Hohoho. Yes, I can understand why one’d be surprised. This dune sea is extremely dangerous to travelers. We found your vehicle some ways back and found some of your tracks in the lee side of the dunes. Figured it was my duty to at least locate your body and bury it, as the Good Lord requests. I’m so glad I found you alive. These dunes have killed more than I care to count. God bless them all.”

Nestor looked at the strange man, standing there with his torso sticking out of the skimmer, “You found my truck? Do…do you live out here, mister?”

“Live? Just live? Boy, we thrive here in this valley. Why, we’ve recreated His Garden here, proving that we’re the chosen.”

“Garden? Chosen? What are you talkin’ about, mister?”

The man smiled broadly, his white teeth gleaming through the strange helmet, “I’m just speaking the good word.” He pawed at his helmet, like he was trying to push back his hat only to realize he could not reach it. “In any instance, yes, we found your truck.”

“Would there be any way you’d help me repair it?”

“Your vehicle is buried to the axles in the sand. I’m sorry to say we’ve nothing can pull something that heavy out of such a quagmire. Perhaps in Coprates City they might have a crane, but it’d take a good bit of convincing to get such a thing transported out here. I truly am sorry to say this to you, but unless you’re richer’n you appear, your vehicle, in its current state, is lost. But the Lord always makes trades for those things that are lost. We’ll salvage what we can carry out, and as payment, I will offer you food and shelter, as much as you want of either, at mine own home. How does that sound?”

“Well it don’t sound great, mister. I need that truck. I cain’t stay with you. I gotta be movin’ on. All’s that’s broken on my truck is the solar panels. I jes need some help gettin’ those panels replaced, and I can figure out the rest myself. Might could dig it out. I have an emergency shovel in my pack here. It’s jes the panels, sir.”

The man’s face contorted. He reached up and ran his hand over the top of his helmet in that same hat-pushing motion, “Well, see now, here’s the thing, those panels aren’t your only problem. My boys are back there right now, stripping the whole truck down. Most equipment that gets abandoned out here, no one ever comes back for. We just assumed, you know, until I saw your footprints down in the sand, well, that is…” he trailed off, looking at Nestor imploringly.

Anger roiled up within Nestor, “That’s theft, mister. That’s my truck. You ain’t allowed to jes find it and take what you want from it. It ain’t right.”

“Well now, hold on. Salvage ain’t theft, my boy. And no one in all this valley is gonna see it any different than how I’ve laid it out for you. You walked away from that truck, and you cain’t do nothing with it anyways, and the law of this here land is finders keepers. Now, I’ve offered you a fair trade for what we’re taking from that truck, and if I were you, I’d take that offer. No one survives walking on foot through the dune seas, and you won’t be any exception. I’d just as soon not leave you out here to die. You come with me, and get some free air and food and rest, charge up your batteries, and if you want to leave on foot then, at least you’ll do it on hardpack, where you might have some sort of chance.”

“Can you jes take me to the nearest city, then? As payment for you takin’ my truck?”

“I might could, but that’s a bit of a drive, and I cain’t drop everything to do it. Cain’t leave my sons back there at your truck, to drive hours and hours away with a stranger. But tell you what. You come back with me, we’ll feed you supper, and we can talk about transport while we eat.”

Nestor nodded slowly, his hunger and his thirst and his exhaustion overruling his caution. He walked over to the skimmer, climbed up the ladder, and dropped into the top hatch behind the man. He crawled over to the passenger seat up front, while behind him, the man reached up to pull the hatch closed. The man flicked a pair of switches and, with a whoosh, the interior of the skimmer pressurized. They both took off their helmets, the man’s requiring a half-turn to unscrew it from the base. Finally un-helmeted, the man reached out a gloved hand to Nestor.

“Eagan Maries. Nice to meet you.”