Beach Boys and the Beach Boys were singing about fun, fun, fun. He heard them singing that 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 shel! 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