“You hear it,” Rand said.
Shapiro reached into his nose and dug with two fingers until it bled. Then he could close his eyes; his thoughts came slowly and clumsily together. His heart was racing.
I was almost like Rand. Jesus!… it almost had me!
He opened his eyes again and saw that Rand had become a conch shell on a long deserted beach, straining forward toward all the mysteries of an undead sea, staring out at the dunes and the dunes and the dunes.
No more, Shapiro moaned inside himself.
Oh, but listen to this wave, the dunes whispered back.
Against his better judgment, Shapiro listened.
Then his better judgment ceased to exist.
Shapiro thought: / could hear better if I sat down.
He sat down at Rand’s feet and put his heels on his thighs like a Yaqui Indian and listened.
He heard the Beach Boys and the Beach Boys were singing about fun, fun, fun. He heard them singing mat the girls on the beach were all within reach. He heard—a hollow sighing of the wind, not in his ear but in the canyon between right brain and left brain—he heard that sighing somewhere in the blackness which is spanned only by the suspension bridge of the corpus callosum, which connects conscious thought to the infinite. He felt no hunger, no thirst, no heat, no fear. He heard only the voice in the emptiness.
And a ship came.
It came swooping out of the sky, afterburners scratching a long orange track from right to left. Thunder belted the delta-wave topography, and several dunes collapsed like bullet-path brain damage. The thunder ripped Billy Shapiro’s head open and for a moment he was torn both ways, ripped, torn down the middle—Then he was up on his feet.
“Ship!” he screamed. “Holy fuck! Ship! Ship! SHIP!” It was a belt trader, dirty and buggered by five hundred—or five thousand—years of clan service. It surfed through the air, banged crudely upright, skidded. The captain blew jets and fused sand into black glass. Shapiro cheered the wound.
Rand looked around like a man awaking from a deep dream.
“Tell it to go away, Billy.”
“You don’t understand.” Shapiro was shambling around, shaking his fists in the air.
“You’ll be all right—” He broke toward the dirty trader in big, leaping strides, like a kangaroo running from a ground fire. The sand clutched at him. Shapiro kicked it away. Fuck you, sand. I got a honey back in Hansonville. Sand never had no honey. Beach never had no hard-on.
The trader’s hull split. A gangplank popped out like a tongue. A man strode down it behind three sampler androids and a guy built into treads that was surely the captain. He wore a beret with a clan symbol on it, anyway.
One of the androids waved a sampler wand at him. Shapiro batted it away. He fell on his knees in front of the captain and embraced the treads which had replaced the captain’s dead legs.
“The dunes… Rand… no water… alive… hypnotized him… dronehead world… I… thank God…” A steel tentacle whipped around Shapiro and yanked him away on his gut. Dry sand whispered underneath him like laughter.
“It’s okay,” the captain said. “Bey-at shell Me! Me! Gat!” The android dropped Shapiro and backed away, clittering distractedly to itself.
“All this way for a fucking Fed!” the captain exclaimed bitterly.
Shapiro wept. It hurt, not just in his head, but in his liver.
“Dud! Gee-yat! Gat! Water-for-him-Cry!” The man who had been in the lead tossed him a nippled low-grav bottle. Shapiro upended it and sucked greedily, spilling crystal-cold water into his mouth, down his chin, in dribbles that darkened his tunic, which had bleached to the color of bone. He choked, vomited, then drank again.
Dud and the captain watched him closely. The androids clittered.
At last Shapiro wiped his mouth and sat up. He felt both sick and well.
“You Shapiro?” the captain asked.
Shapiro nodded.
“Clan affiliation?”
“None.”
“ASN number?”
“29.”
“Crew?”
“Three. One dead. The other—Rand—up there.” He pointed but did not look.
The captain’s face did not change. Dud’s face did.
“The beach got him,” Shapiro said. He saw their questioning, veiled looks. “Shock…
maybe. He seems hypnotized. He keeps talking about the… the Beach Boys… never mind, you wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t drink or eat. He’s bad off.”
“Dud. Take one of the andies and get him down from there.” He shook his head. “Fed ship, Christ. No salvage.” Dud nodded. A few moments later he was scrambling up the side of the dune with one of the andies. The andy looked like a twenty-year-old surfer who might make dope money on the side servicing bored widows, but his stride gave him away even more than the segmented tentacles which grew from his armpits. The stride, common to all androids, was the slow, reflective, almost painful stride of an aging English butler with hemorrhoids.
There was a buzz from the captain’s dashboard.
“I’m here.”
“This is Gomez, Cap. We got a situation here. Compscan and surface telemetry show us a very unstable surface. There’s no bedrock that we can targ. We’re resting on our own burn, and right now that may be the hardest thing on the whole planet. Trouble is, the burn itself is starting to settle.” “Recommendation?”
“We ought to get out.”
“When?”
“Five minutes ago.”
“You’re a laugh riot, Gomez.” The captain punched a button and the communicator went out.
Shapiro’s eyes were rolling. “Look, never mind Rand. He’s had it.”
“I’m taking you both back,” the captain said. “I got no salvage, but the Federation ought to pay something for the two of you… not that either of you are worth much, as far as I can see.
He’s crazy and you’re chickenshit.”
“No… you don’t understand. You—” The captain’s cunning yellow eyes gleamed.
“You got any contra?” he asked.
“Captain… look… please—”
“Because if you do, there’s no sense just leaving it here. Tell me what it is and where it is.
I’ll split seventy-thirty. Standard salvor’s fee. Couldn’t do any better than that, hey? You—” The burn suddenly tilted beneath them. Quite noticeably tilted. A horn somewhere inside the trader began to blat with muffled regularity. The communicator on the captain’s dashboard went off again.
“There!” Shapiro screamed. “There, do you see what you’re up against? You want to talk about contraband now? WE HAVE GOT TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
“Shut up, handsome, or I’ll have one of these guys sedate you,” the captain said. His voice was serene but his eyes had changed. He thumbed the communicator.
“Cap, I got ten degrees of tilt and we’re getting more. The elevator’s going down, but it’s going on an angle. We’ve still got time, but not much. The ship’s going to fall over.”
“The struts will hold her.”
“No, sir. Begging the captain’s pardon, they won’t.”
“Start firing sequences, Gomez.”
“Thank you, sir.” The relief in Gomez’s voice was unmistakable.
Dud and the android were coming back down the flank of the dune. Rand wasn’t with them. The andy fell further and further behind. And now a strange thing happened. The andy fell over on its face. The captain frowned. It did not fall as an andy is supposed to fall—which is to say, like a human being, more or less. It was as if someone had pushed over a mannequin in a department store. It fell over like that. Thump, and a little tan cloud of sand puffed up from around it.
Dud went back and knelt by it. The andy’s legs were still moving as if it dreamed, in the 1.5 million Freon-cooled micro-circuits that made up its mind, that it still walked. But the leg movements were slow and cracking. They stopped. Smoke began to come out of its pores and its tentacles shivered in the sand. It was gruesomely like watching a human die. A deep grinding came from inside it: Graaaagggg!
“Full of sand,” Shapiro whispered. “It’s got Beach Boys religion.” The captain glanced at him impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous, man. That thing could walk through a sandstorm and not get a grain inside it.”
“Not on this world.” The burn settled again. The trader was now clearly canted. There was a low groan as the struts took more weight.
“Leave it!” the captain bawled at Dud. “Leave it, leave it! Gee-yat! Come-me-for-Cry!” Dud came, leaving the andy to walk face-down in the sand.
“What a balls-up,” the captain muttered.
He and Dud engaged in a conversation spoken entirely in a rapid pidgin dialect which Shapiro was able to follow to some degree. Dud told the captain that Rand had refused to come.
The andy had tried to grab Rand, but with no force. Even then it was moving jerkily, and strange grating sounds were coming from inside it. Also, it had begun to recite a combination of galactic strip-mining coordinates and a catalogue of the captain’s folk-music tapes. Dud himself had then closed with Rand. They had struggled briefly. The captain told Dud that if Dud had allowed a man who had been standing three days in the hot sun to get the better of him, that maybe he ought to get another First.