"Oh," said Jindigar, turning from them. He gathered Prey's attention with a glance that prickled Krinata's skin, then bent to pick up a handful of sand and squint northeast as it sifted through his fingers. She watched avidly as the two Dushau made rapport with the place. For centuries Jindigar had worked in the Dushau explorer teams, the Oliat, honing that singular talent. And he was the best.
Recently she'd become Jindigar's debriefing officer, a Programming Ecologist responsible for certifying new worlds. She had dreamed of going into the field as an Oliat Liaison Officer, helping to plant a new colony. Now she was living that dream—but without the full seven members of the Oliat team. They had only Jindigar and his young student, Frey.
Jindigar turned back to them, momentarily shrouded in the distracted air of his Oliat skills, and she yearned to join him and Frey in the odd triune consciousness they had shared to escape from the Emperor's flagship. But his indigo eyes were fixed on the distance as he said, "If we start now, we could reach the edge of this sand-sea by dawn. It's another day's hard march to water. The only problem is the windstorm that's brewing. There'll be some shelter from that at the edge of the desert."
"Isn't there enough energy in that storm to bury the ship?" asked Frey of his elder.
"Good observation," granted Jindigar. "Here, the ship is our only shelter from the blowing sand. But if we stay, we may not be able to dig out and get clear before the Imperials find us. If we start, we must forcemarch to the edge of the valley and climb to shelter before the storm bits." He glanced once more at the sky, brushing the last of the sand from his skin. "Does anyone want to sit here and wait for the Imperials?"
There was a general murmur of negatives, and Gibson stood up to say, "Come, if we're going to outrun that storm, we've got to hurry."
Jindigar sat staring at his map as everyone rose, breaking into groups and heading for the ramp. He added a finishing touch, then wiped the area clean and, with a few deft strokes, sketched a frolicking piol. To an objective observer he might seem untouched by tragedy, but Krinata sensed an undertone of anguish, and recalled how Imp, as a piol pup, had rescued Jindigar's spirits by just being alive.
Finally he rose and turned to go back inside while Krinata stared at the horizon that had captivated Jindigar's attention. Sandstorm?! Why did that send preternatural terror through her nerves? Shuddering, she scrambled to catch Jindigar, drawing him aside at the foot of the ramp.
"If the storm is that close," said Krinata softly, "why don't we make our triad again and push the storm aside?"
"I've told you, Krinata, you can't. You don't dare join us ever again. I should never have allowed it, even once."
"But I could do it. I know I could."
He summoned patience to reiterate wearily, "Desdinda died while trying to make a tetrad out of our triad, and she was insane at that moment. You took the brunt of the shock because you'd had absolutely no training—Frey was hurt so he can barely tolerate the duad now, and I—didn't get away unscathed, either. A triad is out of the question."
"We won't know that until we try it," argued Krinata, part of her acknowledging his expertise, but another part frightened enough of the sandstorm to try anything. She knew the danger. She'd seen Oliat members die when others of their team died. "We've all had time to heal—"
Jindigar sighed. Frey had gone on into the ship, and the Cassrian children were chasing the piols up the ramp. He said, "This is no time to play games with your sanity. You're lucky your imagination isn't running wild during ordinary consciousness. Don't even mink of experimenting with other states. I stand in awe of human mental pliability—but even humans have limits."
She pointed, a sense of outrage starting to build, as if her only chance at real life were being snatched away. "That sandstorm out there could scour the flesh from our bones. Isn't it worth a risk to save the group?"
"Krinata, I know you've never seen anything wrong with Inverting the Oliat function to affect the environment. But to us, it isn't to be done lightly. It's so dangerous, it's often better to accept death. Even if we could triad, I'd never consider influencing that storm's course. It's not the Oliat way to step onto a world and arbitrarily remake it to our convenience."
His words made complete sense. No decent ecologist would interfere with such large natural phenomena without the guidance of a complete Oliat. But, irrationally, her whole body yearned to battle that storm and subdue it. She put it down to her enchantment with the triad rapport. That one taste of the multicentered awareness told her how it could be to perceive the whole ecology of-a world. That was what she'd been born to do. Any training, discipline, or purging she had to go through would be worth it.
Then an odd thought occurred to her. They're afraid to attempt a triad with me again!
Seeing her capitulate, Jindigar turned and climbed the ramp with the Holot, Storm, and the humans, leaving Krinata to follow._
TWO
Sandstorm
The interior of the ship had heated to baking oven temperatures, hotter than the open shade. They found the three Lehiroh and Frey using cutting torches to open the side of the ship to let them pull their anti-grav sleds out. Long ago they'd loaded the colonizing equipment onto the sleds. A mass of less portable items had been stowed in the crushed and inaccessible cargo holds with the two-seater sky birds Truth carried. The orbital landers and the atmosphere sky-birds were all useless now. So the only way to take the bare essentials with them was to pull the anti-grav sleds.
Jindigar took up a cutting torch, only the set of his mouth betraying his distress at butchering his ship. Then, as they were guiding the sleds down the ramp, the Lehiroh instructing them in the use of the sled controls, Jindigar left to return minutes later with a long, flat box Krinata instantly recognized, a Sentient computer's core, which stored the essence of personality if not all peripheral memory. Lovingly he inserted the box into a compartment in one of the sleds and then claimed that sled for his own.
At first Krinata couldn't imagine why he'd done it. Arlai couldn't be revived without a higher technology than they'd be able to rebuild. Then she thought again. In perhaps a thousand years they'd have regained it, Jindigar would be here to use it, and Arlai would wake again.
Minutes later they walked out of Ephemeral Truth and into the ankle-deep sands. She saw Jindigar caress the ship's skin as they passed through the opening. Then, out in the direct sun, Krinata pulled the hood of her cloak over her head. Though her hair was dark, her skin was fair. Despite months of exposure to high-actinic light, she could get the burn of her life in such a desert.
The padded sled harness fit her shoulders so she could lean into it, getting the massive but weightless sled into motion. The sled consisted of a thick platform housing its machinery, surrounded by a peg-and-rope fence set back from the edge to restrain the cargo, which was covered by tarpaulins of the heat-repellent fabric of the desert cloaks.
On each of the four sides of the sled was a covered control panel with one conspicuous lever, the brake. The ones on either side were down to keep the sled from drifting sideways. She'd have to be fast with the brake if she stopped, or the mountain would float inexorably over her and into the sleds and people in front of her.
Jindigar had placed Frey and Storm at the rear, towing the sled loaded with water and indispensable supplies, certain they could keep the pace. They had only one sled to tow between them, so if something happened ahead of them, one of them would be free to help. The two piols chose to ride atop this sled, and Frey made them a small lean-to for shade.
It was past noon when they started, the hottest part of the day yet ahead. She slogged through the sand, turning her mind off, setting her body to endure. Jindigar said they'd make it, and everyone, even the Lehiroh, who were seasoned explorers, Oliat Outriders, believed him. And she'd heard then* leader, Storm, say that Jindigar hadn't survived thousands of years on strange planets by miscalling sandstorms.