Dance with the Dust

Falahim hunkered under the overhang watching the wind-whipped sky shred clouds like strips of oily cotton-waste, with flesh-abrading jet streams of grit flying by on each side.

This Howloon was unseasonal. But, then, Synapp was a unique world. Falahim tried his best to close his ears to the battering "SKREE...EEE" of the wind hammering around the makeshift shelter. Sand coated his cloak with a residue of clinging, choking dust. He drew his hood close around his head until it all but covered the lexine eye guard. Even then the crystalline sand filtered through clothing and left the cloying taste of Synap in his throat.  

Outside, haunches braced against the wind, Falahim's edrinodon had long ago closed off all orifices with the chitin that served as skin on the primitive desert dwelling creatures, among the first of Synap's native life-forms domesticated by the colonists. Dimly, through the flaying wind, Falahim watched it settle in its patient way waiting for the storm to dissipate, ideally adapted to life in Synap's desert. He, himself, had no such facility - but for the Thaumaturge.

Being unseasonal, Falahim reasoned that the storm would reach a speedy conclusion. Recognition of the fact was no consolation. He was still stuck in the middle of the desert when he ought, by now, to have been safe in the security of Eribahnport with the second half of his bankroll tucked away. 

Synap, Falahim thought morosely, pressing his back to the wall of the cave: a contradiction of a world. A bone-dry, skin-fry interior gave way to the abrupt lushness of the coastal plain as though someone had scrawled a line with a crayon.   

He fingered the sealed package beneath his cloak. That the contents were illegal was indisputable: the weight of his money pouch pointed to that, with the rest to come on delivery. The hazardous trek across the desert confirmed the illicit nature. Ask no questions, expect no explanations. Frontier worlds had their own peculiar brand of morality. He thought back over his time as a colonist on Synap and snorted an ironic laugh. For 'colonist' read 'deportee', he thought bitterly. If Hell was retribution it came a very poor second to Synap. But the planet did bring out the best in people. Some got to choose where they were sent. Others were just sent: like him and Olaf.

Big Olaf. Falahim smiled at the memory of the giant Northerner, and railed at the iniquity of a system that despatched someone so ill-attuned to a climate like Synap's. Falahim had been better equipped, entrenched as he had been in the fierce heat of the semi-desert that large portions of Earth had become. That had all been changed by one moment of madness with the local Provincial governor's favourite concubine. Faced with the choice of emasculation or deportation there had really been no choice at all and he had found himself en-route for the frontier world of Synap with little more than he stood up in.   

It had been much the same for Olaf who had shipped out with him - congenitally unable to stomach any sort of officialdom, the system finally got him. The hostile heat of Synap had sapped the big engineer's vitality until the roaring bear that Falahim had shipped out with had become no more than a failing husk. But not, thankfully, before he had produced his little miracle.

Falahim slipped it off his back, popping out the neural relays with a practised ease and turned it over in his hands. The Thaumaturge: it appeared no more than what it was intended to look like - a filtration respirator for use by colonists mining the fringes of the desert. No-one in their right minds ventured any further into Synap than that. But it was much more than a respirator. In many ways Falahim was the Thaumaturge. Plugging directly into the brain through what looked like ordinary breathing tubes, it enabled the wearer to throw out an energy shield - a bio-envelope - that helped maintain body temperatures at an even heat in the most extreme environments. And it was one of a kind, now irreplaceable, with Olaf’s death. He had developed it more as an intellectual exercise than anything else, not really expecting it to defeat the searing heat of the desert. But Falahim had given the lie to that. He sometimes wondered whether the big man had realised what a genius he actually was.

That it had been possible to develop such a revolutionary device surreptitiously was due to Falahim's expertise in 'liberating' material: a pilfered fibre optic here, a hair-thin wire probe there, micro-chips by the handful, and Olaf’s genius at patching circuitry almost out of nothing.   

His idea had been quite simple. Instead of facing a 3,000 mile round trip along the coast to the only other town of any sizeable proportions, wearers would be able to make the much shorter trip across the desert, denied to anything but the edrinodon until then. That had been the idea. Falahim was now the reality

When Olaf died it brought to an end Falahim's cushy number in the Garrison laboratory. Without Olaf, there was no-one to assist, so it was either the crystal mines or be thrown on his own resources. He had chosen his own resources, and with the Thaumaturge to hand the answer was easy: smuggling. Smuggling was rife on Synap. But, apart from illicit loads of the crystal of which Synap was largely composed, there was 'Paradise': the refined extract from the purest of the crystal lodes which were never mined - only found. It transmuted into the most powerful hallucinatory, yet non-addictive, drug known to mankind, so exclusive that it was strictly reserved for the Imperial favour. Falahim saw no reason why that should be. He was not alone, but others chose to work the coastal round trip - a hazardous route. But no-one had possessed a Thaumaturge before.

The wind howled louder outside in the gathering darkness and whipped sand deep into the chamber, making Falahim cough. He plugged the neural relays back in, feeling the fibre-thin probes seek out the miniscule contact points drilled through the top of his nasal cavity, set the Thaumaturge back into its harness, and concentrated his mind on producing the envelope that would again seal him off from the choking dust.   

Thwarted, the wind flung out of the chamber, and whirled away, losing itself amongst the spinning dust motes that clouded the sky. The shriek intensified, a piercing "Skreee - eee - eee" that drilled though Falahim's ears. Eventually, he slept.

He spent a cramped night, awaking to a daybreak that was scarcely more than a sudden lightening of the gloom, seen only through the small aperture that the piling sand had left at the entrance to his bolt-hole. In burying him, the Howloon had spared him the insanity of its insidious keening, now reduced to a muffled roar. He eased his cramped limbs. There was room in the shallow cave only for a half-crouch, and he banged his head on the low overhang as he moved. The rock was primary material, laid down in the birth-throes of the planet, but already veined with the crystalline rock that later grew over the whole of Synap until the wind ground it to powder. Outside, it had long eaten into the crystalline veins, leaving it fissured and convoluted like the lobe of a diseased brain.   

Falahim ran his fingers over the smooth tracks of the crystal veins and tried to remember what he could about crystallography, which was precious little, other than the uncanny, almost sentient, manner in which crystals grew and multiplied. Who could guess at what fabulous crystalline structures had existed on Synap before the Howloon had eaten it all away.   

A sudden spasm of cramp gripped him and he scrabbled crabwise into the teeth of the Howloon, for relief. Instantly his mind was assaulted by the full force of the Howloon's power and the bio-envelope quavered beneath the assault. He clamped off his ears as best he could, whilst massaging some life back into his leg, and cranked the Thaumaturge up another notch. Already, the rock was all but lost in the flying sand which tatooed against the bio-envelope like a monstrous burst of white-noise and Falahim realised that to venture further would be foolhardy. The pain in his leg slackened and he felt his way slowly back to the cave, fumbling like a blind man. He touched the rock's convoluted surface as the wind gusted with a mind-splitting shriek, drawing from him an involuntary yell of pain and terror. He flattened himself against the rock, clinging to the surface as the wind battered at his body, threatening to peel it free and send it spinning to the gun-metal sky. "No!" he screamed. "No!"

"YES!"

The word exploded in his head with the certainty of its presence. As suddenly as it had begun the wind died, leaving Falahim braced taut against the fissured rock. Sand still streamed by, the last exhalation of the Howloon's dying breath. Slowly, it settled. 

The silence after the incessant howl was ominous and, after the insanity of the single syllable, insinuated itself into Falahim's consciousness with a deathly intensity. There had been no intrinsic meaning to what had just filled his consciousness, but the sensation had raked his whole being with a certain, awesome, affirmation. In the silence, the pounding of his heart filled his universe, and the energy field shielding his body flickered on and off as concentration see-sawed. The wind began again then. Not the frightening power of the full Howloon, but an inquisitive breeze that scattered the powdered sand in puffs around Falahim's feet. Now that the crazy whirligig of the Howloon had ceased, the sky had cleared and the crystal desert appeared again, humped and tortured into new and anonymous dunes. Here and there stronger breaths of the sifting breeze whirled, setting up swirling patterns in the sand. Slowly, the circulating eddies solidified into the ubiquitous dust-devils, drawing random patterns through the sand.   

The wind picked up again, itself circulating now, rather than racketing by with its previous wildness, and Falahim boosted his protection to keep out the stinging bite of the blown crystal granules. Instantly his mind was again assaulted. There were no recognisable words this time. Rather, he experienced an enormous sense of ... question, of interrogation - of intrusion. Above all, there was a certain, indefinable rage that pressed down on his shoulders with physical menace.

Wide-eyed, he stared around, desperate to locate the source of the oppressive presence, but there was only the desert, the wind, and the dust devils. More had now appeared and they span slowly in the desert, moving alternately closer then spinning away and dissipating into the atmosphere, only to multiply again, drawn up out of the sand like spun silk. One whipped up immediately in front of him and in his panic he relaxed concentration. The field wavered and, in that instant, the sense of oppression faltered, only to return when the biting crystals of wind-blown sand stung him back to his senses and the Thaumaturge kicked back in, overcompensating. The resulting discomfort took him by surprise and his concentration again lapsed, letting the sand through his defences but, at the same time, losing touch with whoever ... whatever ... was attempting contact. For contact was what he was experiencing Falahim was now convinced. Contact of an entirely alien variety for which he could not formulate the words. And, incredible, though it may seem he could see only one explanation. The Thaumaturge, little miracle that it was, was the catalyst, acting as receiver for God alone knew what alien presence.

Assent immediately roared through his mind, making him reel. The column of dust whirling in front of him span faster, rattling sand off the Thaumaturge's feld. Through the sparkling column Falahim saw the desert flash in stroboscopic frenzy whilst, all the time, his mind formed the unspoken pattern: "YES YES YES YESYESYESYESYESYESYES!"

Dazed by the intensity of the experience his legs buckled and he slid slowly down the rock until slumped on the sand. He was aware that his consciousness had suddenly become a plurality. Inside his head another personality fought to give expression, but a personality that was much, much greater than the individual. Sensations, not words, chased themselves through his mind, building up pictures of a complexity that no words, or even vision, could ever hope to portray. He felt that the atoms of his body were dispersed, that his being was expanded to infinity. He felt he had become nothing, his body less even than the space between its scattered atoms. He was ethereal, yet all-encompassing. He was the air, the sand and the desert. He was knowledge. He was wisdom. He was Being. He was the Howloon. He was Synap.

The presence withdrew and Falahim stared uncomprehendingly at the swirling clouds of dust that still danced and pirouetted across the desert. The blast of sudden knowledge had overwhelmed him, leaving him cowed and submissive, like a whipped dog. Necessity only kept him operating the Thaumaturge which now shielded him from the sun powering from a brassy sky. With a primordial urge for self-preservation he drew back from the brink of insanity and scrambled back inside the cave.

Trembling, he pressed against the furthest corner of the shelter. What secret had he and Olaf stumbled on? In those brief, incredible moments, Falahim had stepped outside his body and experienced a sensation vastly different from anything he had ever experienced. He had flown with the wind, danced circles in the sand, joined his formless body with the dust of the desert and given it shape, birthed it, grown with it, exulted in it. He had felt the agony, the tearing ecstasy of dismemberment, seen the glistening crystal ripped from its core, shredded, ground and transported away. He had sorrowed. He had felt the anger, the rage ... the impotence. The planet was alive! The whole of the God-forsaken rock was a living being.

The realisation dawned on Falahim with the awful clarity of absolute knowledge. And its very core - its existence - was slowly being eaten away. For decades, the Imperial Machine had torn out the planet's guts and he, Falahim, was a part of it. A very new part, it was true, but the life-span of even a civilisation was a mere nano-second in terms of the ... Existence ... there was no other word to describe it. Suddenly Falahim felt very small.

"YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD!"

The word shapes thundered into Falahim's mind as the wind screamed around the cave entrance. His response was an awe-struck, silent, affirmation. 

The Howloon registered satisfaction. "YOU WILL GO!"

Falahim understood the "you" to be impersonal. The Howloon cared as little for him as it might a mote of dust caught in its calcined grasp. The "you" referred to the Colony. 

He signified understanding, but tried to establish a sense of inability. The Howloon roared in response. Falahim clapped his hands over his ears at the ferocity of the sensation. There was no compunction in the statement, and here Falahim did recognise the sense of the personal, “YOU WILL GO NOW!"

The howling ferocity of the wind outside then stopped, as if someone had thrown a switch. The silence left behind echoed. Shaken, he crept from the cave, sensing that he was released. In the mid-distance the dust-devils still spiralled lazily across the desert, eerie now that the air was still. Nearer to hand the sand suddenly heaved, and Falahim started back in horror, then relaxed as the head of his edrinodon broke through the surface, snorting. The animal shook its flanks showering a curtain of gritty, clinging dust, and settled with its head raised in reptilian obeisance to the glaring sun. He made to mount.

"WAIT!"

Falahim cringed beneath the renewed onslaught of the Howloon's 'voice' as the largest of the dust-devils swirled towards him.

"THE PARTICLES!"

 It hovered in front of him, pouring out its message with laden menace. For a moment Falahim did not understand, then reached slowly for the package of 'Paradise' hidden in his clothing. Affirmation beamed from the column of dust swirling before him and Falahim tore at the bindings of the package, scattering the fine powder onto the desert floor. The column moved forward and took the gleaming crystal powder into its spinning vortex. With a final sensation of hate, rage and warning, the dust-devil span away dissipating its body to the elements until the desert was clear once more. 

Synap had reclaimed a small part of what had been taken, and Falahim shuddered at the thought of what might be to follow, as the Howloon proceeded to reclaim its birthright. Soon, even Erinbahnport would dance with the dust.