Sand Walkers

Sand Walkers

An Earth to Nancy Story

By

Peter Brickwood

The Jessie touched Ursula’s elbow. “That’s as close as you should get to the sand.”

The tall woman’s lightly creased face looked down on the Jessie, “Really, how can I be in any danger here?”

“If I am to save you from death, you have to trust that I know the risks.” Sighing, the Jessie added, “We don’t want to incinerate you, too.” Her fingers flicked behind her back, commanding the members of the protective detail to move ahead and to the sides of the pair as they stood on the long rock slope leading to the endless expanse of sand.

“But I’m ten yards up bare rock.”

“Yes.” The Jessie nodded. “But you cannot tell a windborne worm from an ordinary grain of sand.”

“Pssah.” Ursula made a dismissive sound. “These blood worms of yours cannot be as small as tiny granules.”

“They can.” The Jessie shook her head. “Specks so small you hardly feel them against your skin. Within a minute, the body is infested with worms reproducing as fast as they can suck blood, growing and dividing until your body explodes and splatters over all of us. In self-preservation, we would have to kill you, just like your assistant, and destroy your corpse with flame throwers before the blood worms could escape and attack.”

The woman’s features became harsh as she admitted, “I suppose I don’t want to see that again, much less experience it.”

“The human race has found us after a thousand years, and they don’t care. You’re the only person in the whole galaxy that’s interested in us. And that’s only so you can study us for your anthropology thing.”

Ursula stared out at the valley between two rocky promontories covered in gnarled trees. “Does the sand really spread out like an ocean?” She pulled a high-tech viewer from her bag and pointed it at the distant horizon. “All I see is sand.”

The Jessie looked over her shoulder toward a woman of medium height with tightly bound blonde hair and the chaffed reddened skin that came with long exposure to the relentless sun. “Swot?”

The blonde woman’s brows furrowed, “Jessie, I’m not a Swot and don’t study all those books about astral navigation and other useless stuff. I just like reading the stories.”

“You’re the closest thing I have to a Swot, so do any of those ‘stories’ tell you about oceans?”

Swot thought for a few moments before answering. “The water surface on World One covered half of the planet. A person could stand on the edge of the land—they called it ‘beach.’” She laughed. “It was made of sand. When they looked away from the shore, they saw nothing but water in the same way we see nothing but sand when we look out from a point.”

“We can go out to the points.” Exclaimed Ursula, “I want to do that.”

Jessie’s mouth tightened, “Guarding you is like minding a curious toddler.” Her mouth twisted as she thought, “All right, we can go out the old crash point path. We’ll only need a demi-dec.”

Swot reached for a bag on her belt. A squat thickset man held out a hand to stop her. He glanced around; two tall men and a short woman all nodded. He said, “We’ll take her. You mediums go and enjoy an afternoon off. Soon enough, you’ll be making babies and have no time for yourself.”

Sadness clouded Swot’s eyes as she acknowledged his gift. “Thanks, Dem.”

The four guards formed up in a diamond around Ursula and Jessie. The group set off at a pace that matched Ursula’s brisk walk. Chattering excitedly, she asked, “Why do you call it a dec? I’ve heard of squads, ranks, files, crews, sticks but never decs. Stick is an interesting one, we can learn so much…”

The Jessie waited until Ursula paused for breath. “Dec is a group of ten people. Almost all our work is done in groups of ten. I think it started with work crews on our spaceship.”

“Ah,” Ursula’s eyes got a faraway look. “Like demi-tasse means half a cup in ancient French, so ‘demi-dec’ means half a ten-person crew. I must make notes.” She fumbled in her bag for a small device and began talking to it. Presently she asked, “Swot, Dem, Jessie. I thought you didn’t use names.”

“Don’t,” replied Jessie with a tinge of annoyance. “Some of us love to study and understand all kinds of stuff. We call them ‘Swot.’ A long tradition, I don’t know why. ‘Dem’ comes from demi and means he is the half-commander, who takes over when I get killed. They’re not names, they’re job titles.”

“‘Jessie’ doesn’t sound like a title.”

“They’re teasing me. Our cohort has finished its five years of blood patrols which means we are young adults. I was elected to represent our cohort on the Governing Council. For some reason that nobody knows, the job is called ‘The Jessie.’”

Ursula talked to her machine again. After a minute she asked, “What did Dem mean, they’d be ‘making babies’ soon? Won’t you all be—” She bit her lip. “Oh, sorry.”

“S’all right,” said Jessie with a shrug, “We’ve all know for years we’d be ’cards.”

Dem turned onto a metal path leading under the trees of a forested point of land that ran out into the sand sea. The woman guard moved up beside him and the two men fell back behind them—so they formed a box.

“Biggest danger here is that a snake will drop out of a tree onto you. If you can get out of its way so it drops to the metal deck, we can kill and burn it. But if it gets its teeth into you, we’ll have to burn you.” Jessie looked up at the tall woman beside her.

Ursula hunched herself over a bit and kept walking. She asked, “What did you mean ‘’cards’?”

Jessie laughed. “Short for ‘discards.’ By the time we’ve been doing Blood Worm Patrols for a year, we almost always stop growing. Like me and those two.” She tipped her chin toward the two guards in front of her and Ursula. “Women my size are known as ‘pitifully petit.’ That pair,” she jerked her head toward the two behind her. Ursula looked up at them. Jessie smiled. “They’re nicknamed ‘too talls.’”

“Didn’t your ship have a bank of egg and sperm cells?”

“Oh, yes. Apparently the medical technology of reproduction was fairly advanced when GenTwo, our ship, left World One, uh,—”

“Earth,” supplied Ursula.

“The GenNeers were hmm, medical personnel responsible for maintaining the population on GenTwo. As best we can tell, they did a great job. The problem happened after we crashed, and the cryogenic storage banks lost power. The baby cells all melted into mush.”

Ursula’s head jerked and she blinked then, hesitantly, asked, “Ah, but why, um, ‘discard’ only the tall and short people?”

“Our bad luck.” Straining to keep her voice measured and reasonable, Jessie replied, “Somewhere back in the first century on Nancy, the settlers realized that if we run at a steady pace, the worms ignore us. If we break stride or run in a ragged pattern, they home in on the vibrations and usually kill the whole patrol before swarming and racing up the sand valley. Our job is to use our radios to warn agricultural workers so they can get off the sand and onto metal platforms or the rock shore where the blood worms can’t get at them.”

“But what does that have to do with being tall or short?”

“Tall and short people lope—run, with an ever so-slightly different rhythm that attracts the worms.” In an obvious attempt to change the topic, Jessie asked, “Do you know what kind of trees these are?” She waved at the twisted trunks and branches with long tubular leaves.

“No. All planets have indigenous life forms that have never been seen before…” Ursula’s voice trailed off.

“One of the landers christened them ‘Christmas Trees.’ Do you know what that means?”

“What?” Ursula would have stopped but Jessie pushed her elbow to keep her moving. “Were your settlers Christians?”

“What’s that?”

“Followers of a religion from earth with a holy day called ‘Weihnachten.’ That means ‘Christmas.’ The holiday was celebrated by bringing small triangular trees into their houses.”

“I don’t think there were any uh, ‘Christians’ among the landers.” Jessie shook her head. “But the young trees are triangular. As they get older and taller, they become more contorted.”

Ahead of them, Dem burst through the trees into brilliant sunlight falling on a large outcrop formed by rock that had been burnt bare.

Ursula’s eyes widened as she turned to look at unbroken sand for as far as she could see. A fine beige dust was moving away from the land in a light breeze. The surface of the sand sea glistened with small ripples that seemed to flow in the light. “It really is like an ocean.”

Jessie waited quietly while Ursula gazed out at the bright blue sky beyond the far-off horizon. Ursula began to sit down on the rock, but Jessie took her elbow again. “Please don’t. There can be tiny snakes hidden by cracks in the rock.”

“Ahh,” a strangled sound came from the female guard closest to the sand’s edge. Three of the guards went into half crouches and reached for handheld flame throwers tucked into their waists or slung at their hips. The tall who was carrying a backpack burner lifted the nozzle to check its pilot flame was lit.

The talls carefully examined the trees while Dem and Jessie scrutinized the rocky ground and blowing sand. Seeing nothing, Jessie called to the guard. “What is it?” The woman choked on her answer and could only wave an arm in the direction of the next point.

On the far point, a man was stacking rocks around a metal pole.

Ursula pulled out her viewer and trained it on the man. “He seems to have fixed that metal pole so it will stand by itself.” She offered Jessie the viewer. “Do you want to take a closer look?”

Heavily, Jessie answered, “No, thank you.” Addressing the female guard, she asked, “Is it Gingie?” The guard pressed her lips tight, nodded, and wiped a tear from her cheek.

“He’s sitting down now,” Ursula said. “Seems to be taking off his boots. Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Boots are very valuable,” Jessie explained. “It’s easy enough to replace pants and shirts but it’s difficult to make good boots. We use hard plastic for the soles and horsehide for the uppers which all has to be glued and sewed tight so there’s no miniscule gaps to let in worms.”

Ursula frowned, “He seems to be hanging the boots upside down on the pole.”

“So, snakes won’t get in and surprise someone.” Jessie looked at the guard. “Was he expecting bad news?”

The female guard gulped. “He was hoping everything would be OK but because of his red hair, and you remember when he was very little, he got angry a couple of times; he was afraid the GenNeers would tell him he had the ‘mad’ gene.”

Ursula clicked her electronic viewfinder a couple of times. She frowned. “Must be something wrong with this thing, says he’s medium height.”

“He is.” Jessie sighed again. “The GenNeers must have told him he’s being discarded.”

Ursula’s hands dropped as she gaped at Jessie. “Because he has red hair?”

Jessie huffed, a small sour smile twisting her mouth, “Back in the beginning during the first century or so of settlement here on Nancy, there was a huge fight. The GenNeers said we would kill ourselves off. Uh…”

“Become extinct?”

“Yeah, that’s the word. They said there were too many sick, weak and uh, people who couldn’t think very well. I only know the rude word for it.”

“Mentally challenged?”

“Boy, you social anthropologists know everything. Anyway, the GenNeers said that because the frozen babies had all melted, they would have to decide who could have babies so that we would remain—” Ursula started to speak but Jessie held up a hand. “I remember this one, a ‘genetically viable population.’ Like I said, it was a huge fight. There was a red-haired guy, I think his name was ‘Gingie,’ who wanted to marry and have babies with a woman who was called ‘developmentally challenged.’ The Governing Council decided they could have a baby, which of course they did. But worms got the child. The woman—Faith was her name—couldn’t stand the grief and she went out on the sand, barefoot, so the worms would kill her.”

“He’s doing that?” asked Ursula. She raised her viewer again. “He’s shuffling his feet as he walks on the sand.”

The group kept watching their surroundings for worms and snakes, occasionally glancing toward the red-headed man trudging into the beige ocean.

Dem made a slight sound so that he could catch Jessie’s eye. She shook her head slightly. Dem frowned, tilting his head up toward Ursula. Jessie shook her head and rocked her chin toward the female guard watching Gingie disappear over the sand. Dem grimaced but went back to surveying the sand around them.

Daylight was beginning to darken when the group heard a faint whump and a small cloud of sand blossomed far out on the horizon. The female guard let out an audible sigh. Then the other members of the demi-dec began moving along the path toward the settlement.

Ursula’s expression was grave. “Do people often suicide?”

“Not many of us die of old age.” There was grim humor in Jessie’s voice. “We discards will keep doing Blood Worm Patrols and other dangerous work. We won’t live long. The mediums will be protected, given the least dangerous jobs for as long as they can have babies. That’s how our settlement survives.”

As the demi-dec came out of the trees, the rest of the dec joined and fell into the usual diamond square formation. Swot trotted along not far from Jessie. Quietly, she asked, “What happened?”

“Gingie became a sand walker.”

The End