“In a rush, the people who survive and thrive are the people sellin’ to the doers. Always. Every time. Doers’ll pay any price in a rush. Don’t you ever forget that, son. They tell you they found gold? You sell ’em shovels. They say they found Danvar? You be the one sellin’ dive gear, fixin’ regulators, makin’ their visors work, haulin’ packs, repairin’ sarfers. That’s where the solid coin is. Dependable. All of time and every grain of this sand bears witness to what I’m sayin’.”
The Poet pressed back in the haul rack, flexing his thighs, and settled himself against his gear bag. His tools pressed into his side, but he was happy to be riding and not sailing. Glad not to be working for free. His sarfing days were over, and that was part of his deal with Bolger. “I don’t sail, I ride,” was what he told the boss. Still, even though he didn’t sail a sarfer, he expected he’d still be the most important man on the team. He had to believe that. Why else would Bolger take a seasoned old vet out on the dunes? Why else did everyone want to hire the Poet?
Then the Poet’s daddy always said, “Make yourself valuable, son. Become necessary—what they used to call ‘mission critical.’ Sand diver’s the most replaceable species of man in all the world of the sand. Sand diver’s just like the sand, in fact. Their comin’ is endless, like the rush, like the sift. You kill ’em all and a thousand-thousand’ll take their places. Every boy who hates the sand wants to be up un’erneath it, lookin’ to get rich so he can buy a way to avoid the sand. Drownin’ ’cause he’s thirsty.”
So the Poet grew up with hard wisdom. And now, in his sixties, he was everyman. He was porter and tinker, supply clerk, mechanic, technician. He was an advisor to the bosses. A black-market wizard he was. A man who found out things that needed to be known, for the right price, and only to the right buyer. He was no spy, though. Spies got themselves killed just like sand divers. The Poet was on this expedition because he’d made himself irreplaceable, just like his daddy had said. Every dive team in all of Low-Pub and all the Thousand Dunes wanted to hire the Poet. Too, all the way up to Springston, they say. Expedition leaders even stopped by when he was already hired, trying to lure him away with coin or women or both. But the Poet could never be hired away once he had a job going. That was nothing but a good way to get dead. His value was increased by his loyalty. And who needed a woman anyway?
The sweat drenched his old body. He wore a dive suit up under his robes. Nobody knew this but him, and if anyone ever found out, it would make him the target of ridicule—a risk worth taking, in his eyes. So he had a full suit on, and a visor in his gear bag, too. You never know when a brigand is going to break every law of the dunes and man and use the sand as a weapon. Everyone knew the axiomatic law of the sand and humanity, but what is law to a brigand? Nothing. So the Poet wore his dive suit, and suffered the heat. No way was he going to lose his fortune because he minded the heat.
They were far up north now. Way up in the wastes. Even Springston was far behind them. This was dying land for divers, and the Poet knew it. Everyone out looking for Danvar, and a diver’s life wasn’t worth scoop out in the wastes. And the divers were everywhere. Sarfer sails in every direction, setting out willy-nilly, divers looking to become gods.
The Poet breathed through his ker and looked around. This team wasn’t any better. There was nothing scientific about the search
Except the Poet
They say that only a fool dives alone. He’d heard that one all his life, but with the things he’d seen in just the past year Peary was now convinced that the smart divers
could
Some divers had a knack for salvage, and others just hoped to get lucky. Peary was of the latter sort, and he was wary of the former. There was a fine line between having a knack, and getting noticed. Only a few divers got famous without getting killed soon after, because a rich diver who didn’t retire became a nice target. Some even achieved levels of fame that bordered on legend. But fame wasn’t for Peary. Better to keep your head down and just dive.
He checked his dive suit and extra batteries, and when he saw that they were all fully charged, he unplugged them from the wind generator at the aft end of the sarfer. He grabbed a reinforced plastic gear box from the hauler, disconnected the wind generator, and stowed it in the box.
Time to secure his stuff. He’d brought a supply of parts, some extra air tanks—not just extra for the dive, but extra even over and above what he planned on taking down with him—and two more canteens of water. Those last had cost him time and coin—coin he’d borrowed from Marisa—but you can never be too careful. And there was an extra dive suit and visor, too. All of these he’d bury on the other side of the dune as soon as he was suited up. If someone stole his sarfer, he wanted to have at least an outside chance of living to dive another day. Burying gear nearby wouldn’t thwart an experienced and professional band of brigands, but most dune thieves were opportunists and not professionals.
Peary took a quick sand bath, rubbing the hot silica over his body, drying up some of the sweat, and then he started to suit up. The dive suit was hot and the soft rubber felt like it was burning his skin. This part of diving always made him work faster. It made him long for the cool chill of depth. He shouldered the twin tanks and dragged the two extras behind him, pulled on his visor and did a thorough check, even while his body was crying for the relief of the deep. The two tanks on his back pulled downward—toward Danvar, he hoped.
He’d never even attempted to dive more than two fifty. Never once. Hadn’t even wanted to. Around two hundred meters was always his personal limit. Today, he’d go deeper. He didn’t yet know how much deeper. He needed to pay Marisa back. At least the coin she’d lent him; the rest he could never repay. The love and care she gave him were priceless. How she continued to love him despite his folly, he’d never know. Sweet Marisa . Wearing herself out under a haulpole day after day so that he could dive salvage.
Peary would leave spare tanks along the way down. Crutches, the daring divers would say. Training wheels. He wasn’t one of the legends who could go three hundred or more on a single tank and get back, and he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to. This wasn’t about personal feats or challenging himself. He wasn’t looking to have his name on the lips of divers and brigands throughout the Thousand Dunes or in the bars and whorehouses of Low-Pub or Springston. This was about Danvar, and the coin that would go along with it. This was the time when divers would be getting rich. Why couldn’t it be him? He’d rather be lucky than good
He pulled on his fins and fitted the regulator. It was diving time. That moment when all conceivable results were still plausible and, according to some nonsense he’d heard from divers who liked to talk, even existed out there at the same time. Wealth? Maybe. Death? Maybe that. He turned on his homing beacon and set it down, pushing it just under the sand. Time to concentrate.
He heard a dune-hawk overhead and wondered if it was a sign. Maybe. The hum started in his inner man and he started to move the sand. He took his first deep breath of canned life, and then the sand received him.
Bolger was a good boss because he kept the bottom line in view. He did what had to be done to make sure the crew ended up on the salvage. And by “on the salvage,” he meant literally on top of it. In reach of it. In the case of this expedition, the goal was Danvar, so success was far from automatic. No one had found Danvar yet—not in untold hundreds of years—unless the most recent rumors were to be believed. But there had always been rumors, and always would be. The rumors had sparked this latest rush. Someone said Brock was the man whose team had found Danvar.
Brock. He was the brigand and crew leader who now claimed the northern wastes. They weren’t his, but he liked to say they were. Claiming the wastes was like claiming the stars in the heavens, and you could—if you wanted to fight to hold them. The Poet had worked for the man before. Brock wasn’t to be trusted; not because he wasn’t after the coin and the goods—he lusted after coin as much as the next brigand—but because there was something
stupid
The miles shifted fast, and though he had his sand legs—always did—he was ready for camp. Decades ago he would have been longing for a tent and the feel of a woman, but now he just wanted the tent. A woman—even a camp woman—was just a hole into which a foolish man threw coin. Not everyone agreed, obviously, but the wisdom of the Poet didn’t sit right with every man.
Women divers though, that was another thing altogether. There weren’t many, but the ones he’d met were better than any man. Male divers thought with their sex and treated diving like it was a competition. A woman diver did her work, made her coin, and didn’t treat it like a game. She’d live longer than any boy. That’s why the mortality rate was so high among boys who ventured under the dunes. Near on a hundred percent, he figured, if you stretch out the timeline long enough.
Can’t spend love
The Poet had seen men die in ways he’d never thought possible back when he was a boy spending his days running errands and polishing his daddy’s sarfer. Back when he was learning the ways of the sand. He released the rope he was holding for a second and knocked the matte from his hair. Some of it fell down into the top of his ker, working its way into the corners of his mouth and beard, but the rest went back home to join the swells of particulate that—as far as he knew—covered the whole earth but for the distant mountaintops out west.
Topping a dune up ahead of him, Bolger shouted, and as the Poet came up behind him he saw him pointing toward a disruption on the horizon. Maybe an oasis, or maybe a copse of treetops jutting up from the sand. Likely to be water either way. His man kept on his draft and the convoy headed for the feature on the horizon. Sun was up full now and hot. Water would be necessary if Bolger planned to push them farther north.
The aqua color down there—down at the fringes of his vision, now giving way to darker purple—reminded him of Marisa, and the polished rocks, turquoise and green, she’d bought from a trader once with precious coin. He loved her for that, too, even if he didn’t get it and thought it was wasteful. There was no sorting it. A woman loved what she loved, and who could figure it?
As he descended, the cool came, and he felt it through his suit, and welcomed it. He sipped on his tank and stretched for the deep. He’d forgotten to count, which was more of a habit than a rule, but his visor showed him at fifty meters and he was just starting to feel the press in his chest. Not tight yet, but firm and good. He liked the feel of fifty to a hundred, and maybe another twenty or thirty after that, but then the real pushback came, and he didn’t like that so much.
The air from his tanks was nice and sweet, but he had a tiny stream of gunk making its way into his goggles. Nothing tragic, but not ideal. He concentrated on moving the sand and flowing it smoothly around himself. No blips on his visor yet. He didn’t expect to see the sandscrapers of Danvar yet—those were said to be a mile down, and even if they were half that he wouldn’t see them on this dive—but depth and distance were odd out in the shifting dunes. He’d often found salvage at less than one fifty, and had hit hard ground at less than two hundred before. And this time he was going deeper.