Jessica closed her eyes, found herself moved close to tears by the pathos in her son’s voice.
Presently, Paul said: “How do you … feel?”
She recognized that his question was directed at her pregnancy, said: “Your sister won’t be born for many months yet. I still feel … physically adequate.”
And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my own son! Then, because it was the Bene Gesserit way to seek within for the answer to such an oddity, she searched and found the source of her formality: I’m afraid of my son; Ifearhis strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.
Paul pulled his hood down over his eyes, listened to the bug-hustling sounds of the night. His lungs were charged with his own silence. His nose itched. He rubbed it, removed the filter and grew conscious of the rich smell of cinnamon.
“There’s melange spice nearby,” he said.
An eider wind feathered Paul’s cheeks, ruffled the folds of his burnoose. But this wind carried no threat of storm; already he could sense the difference.
“Dawn soon,” he said.
Jessica nodded.
“There’s a way to get safely across that open sand,” Paul said. “The Fremen do it. ”
“The worms?”
“If we were to plant a thumper from our Fremkit back in the rocks here,” Paul said. “It’d keep a worm occupied for a time.”
She glanced at the stretch of moonlighted desert between them and the other escarpment. “Four kilometers worth of time?”
“Perhaps. And if we crossed there making only natural sounds, the kind that don’t attract the worms….”
Paul studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Fremkit manual that had come with their escape pack. He found it odd that all he sensed was pervasive terror at thought of the worms. He knew as though it lay just at the edge of his awareness that the worms were to be respected and not feared … if … if….
He shook his head.
“It’d have to be sounds without rhythm,” Jessica said.
“What? Oh. Yes. If we broke our steps … the sand itself must shift down at times. Worms can’t investigate every little sound. We should be fully rested before we try it, though.”
He looked across at that other rock wall, seeing the passage of time in the vertical moonshadows there. “It’ll be dawn within the hour.”
“Where’ll we spend the day?” she asked.
Paul turned left, pointed. “The cliff curves back north over there. You can see by the way it’s wind-cut that’s the windward face. There’ll be crevasses there, deep ones.”
“Had we better get started?” she asked.
He stood, helped her to her feet. “Are you rested enough for a climb down? I want to get as close as possible to the desert floor before we camp.”
“Enough.” She nodded for him to lead the way.
He hesitated, then lifted the pack, settled it onto his shoulders and turned along the cliff.
If only we had suspensors, Jessica thought. It’d be such a simple matter to jump down there. But perhaps suspensors are another thing to avoid in the open desert. Maybe they attract the worms the way a shield does.
They came to a series of shelves dropping down and, beyond them, saw a fissure with its ledge outlined by moonshadow leading along the vestibule.
Paul led the way down, moving cautiously but hurrying because it was obvious the moonlight could not last much longer. They wound down into a world of deeper and deeper shadows. Hints of rock shape climbed to the stars around them. The fissure narrowed to some ten meters’ width at the brink of a dim gray sandslope that slanted downward into darkness.
“Can we go down?” Jessica whispered.
“I think so.”
He tested the surface with one foot.
“We can slide down,” he said. “I’ll go first. Wait until you hear me stop.”
“Careful,” she said.
He stepped onto the slope and slid and slipped down its soft surface onto an almost level floor of packed sand. The place was deep within the rock walls.
There came the sound of sand sliding behind him. He tried to see up the slope in the darkness, was almost knocked over by the cascade. It trailed away to silence.
“Mother?” he said.
There was no answer.
“Mother?”
He dropped the pack, hurled himself up the slope, scrambling, digging, throwing sand like a wild man. “Mother!” he gasped. “Mother, where are you?”
Another cascade of sand swept down on him, burying him to the hips. He wrenched himself out of it.